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CONCERNING CHRIST 





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Concerning Christ 


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A. H.'MCNEILE, D.D. 


Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Dublin ; 
Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. 





D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
NEW YORK : : MCMXXIV 


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 


Preface 


SERMONS and addresses originally spoken to a 
variety of congregations are here arranged so as 
to form roughly a connected series. The first Part 
is concerned with the earthly life of Christ—Child 
and Man—leading to some doctrinal considerations 
of His Nature and Person. The second Part is 
similarly arranged: the stories of Passion week, 
rich in practical lessons for the spiritual life, are 
followed by a few chapters in which an attempt 
is made to suggest a line of thought by which to 
approach the study of the great and complex 
doctrine of the Atonement. 

Ideas on religious things to-day change their 
colours and shapes with kaleidoscopic variety. 
Nothing can fix them into a permanent pattern. 
But the one imperative need is that the pattern 
should be kept at all times in the direct rays of the 
Sun, that each variety in turn may shine. And 
therefore no effort of the Christian preacher can 
be quite wasted if he offers his own fragmentary 
ideas in ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ 


A. H. MCNEILE. 


DUBLIN, 
September, 1923. 


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Contents 


PAGB 


INTRODUCTION.—WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? > ix 
PART I. 
I. THE PREPARATION” - - - - - I 
2. THE CHILD - - - - - - 6 
3. THE SEARCH - - - - - - II 
4. EPIPHANY - - - - - : 16 
5. THE Boy - - - - - - 21 
6. THE IMAGE oF Gop Se CARRION 
47. INSTINCTS - - - : - - 40 
8. PARADOXES - - - - - - 49 
Q. ECCENTRICITY - - - - ~ - 53 
IO. REPENTANCE - - - - - - 59 
rr. THE PRINCELY SPIRIT ” - - - 65 
12. PRINCIPLES - - - - - - 7 fe 
13. THE REAL MAN - - - - - 80 
PART II. 
I. TRIUMPH - - - - - - - 85 
2. JUDAS - - - - - - - go 
3. SILENCE - - - - - : - 96 
4. SIMON THE CYRENIAN - - - - 103 
5. PILATE’S PLACARD - - - - = LOO) 
6. JOSEPH OF ARIMATHAEA - - - - II4 
7. SACRIFICE - - - - - -  “Ttg 
8. METAPHORS OF SALVATION : - - 126 
g. FIRST PRINCIPLES’ - - - - - 133 
10. ATONEMENT - . - - - - 139 
II. EXPERIENCE - - - - - - 149 


vii 





Introduction 


WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY ? 


CHRISTIANITY is Christ; He is its Centre, its Soul, 
its All. And we are going to meditate on some 
of the wonderful features of Him and it. When 
He was on earth He asked “Who do men say that 
I am?’ There is no doubt that people thought 
very highly of Him. They felt Him to be really 
great; far above any ordinary man of His day. 
They could not tell Him to His face..what they 
thought of Him; but the disciples knew; they went 
about among the villages and heard people talk. 
Some said He was John the Baptist, who had 
recently been killed by Herod; some said Elijah; 
others Jeremiah, or one or other of the great 
prophets of old come to life again. And they were 
all wrong; He was far greater than any notion 
that they could form of Him. That is very much 
what many people do to-day. They have a polite 
respect for Christianity; they think that it means 
this and that and the other; they form out of their 
own minds an inadequate notion of what Christ is; 
and then they are not satisfied. They picture a 
Christ suited to their own level of thought, and 
then realize that the picture is not good enough. 
For vast numbers of people the fact of Christ 
has become like a rapidly fading photograph, the 
features of which have almost gone. The picture 
is put away in the disused album of outworn 
memories, and they are content to go on with their 


ix 


x INTRODUCTION 


quiet, respectable, good-natured worldliness as 
though there never had been a Christ at all. 

Who do men say that Christ is? Some say, 
John the Baptist; a strong, stern figure, who cried 
Repent! He drew men in crowds, that strange, 
rugged son of the desert. He condemned the 
Pharisees and Sadducees, he spoke home truths to 
the collectors of custom and to the Roman soldiers, 
he denounced to his face Herod the adulterer. 
But ‘he that is least in the Kingdom of Heaven 
is greater than he.’ To rebuke sin, however 
fearlessly, to cry Repent! with a voice however 
searching, is not Christianity. But many people 
to-day think it is; Christianity means being good, 
and denouncing everything wrong. John the 
Baptist was a stern and solitary ascetic; he came, 
as our Lord expressed it, ‘neither eating nor 
drinking’; and the Jews said ‘He hath a devil.’ 
A life of strenuous self-denial was more than they 
could stand. And some to-day, who don’t want 
to deny themselves at any price, think of Chris- 
tianity as a so-called Gospel, of which the only 
message is “You mustn't do that.’ Christianity 
does, indeed, involve self-denial; Christ said quite 
clearly that no one could be His follower without 
it. But John the Baptist was a Jew, and nothing 
but a Jew. If we are insearch for true Christianity 
we must find something better and larger than the 
very best Judaism. 

And others say, Elijah—even further removed 
from the fullness of Christ; one who brought 
murderous flashes of lightning to shrivel up a 
hundred men; one who took the lead in slaughtering 


INTRODUCTION xl 


the prophets of Baal en masse; one who, according 
toS. James’ epistle, prayed for adrought which lasted 
eighteen months, with all the suffering that that 
would mean to innocent and guilty alike in the 
whole population. What do men say that Chris- 
tianity is? Some say it is a religion of pains and 
penalties; a religion that says, Be good, for fear of 
the wrath to come, for fear of the terrible Judge, 
or the fires of purgatory, or the bitter pains of 
eternal death. It is strange that while people are 
quite able to realize that a religion of mere pains 
and penalties is not a very noble religion, so many 
still cling to the notion, which thinking Christians 
have long given up, that the religion of the New 
Testament is not essentially different from that of 
the Old; that Christ is the same as Elijah: that 
God is chiefly and primarily a God who punishes. 
And this old-world, Jewish notion is carried by 
some people into the very heart of their Christian 
theology. A God who punishes must punish 
someone, and if He doesn’t punish sinners He 
punishes Christ instead. Many are quite sure that 
that is not true, but they think that Christianity 
teaches that it is, and so they think that Christianity 
is mistaken. 

And others say, Jeremiah, the sorrowful prophet 
to whose message no one would listen, ‘Hear ye 
and give ear for the Lord hath spoken. ... But 
if ye will not hear, my soul shall weep in secret 
for your pride; and mine eyes shall weep sore and 
run down with tears, because the Lord’s flock is 
taken captive.’ ‘Let mine eyes run down with 
tears night and day, and let them not cease, for 


XU INTRODUCTION 


the virgin daughter of my people is broken with 
a very grievous wound.’ ‘Oh that my head were 
waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I 
might weep day and night for the slain of the 
daughter of my people.’ That seems to be the 
notion that some people have of Christianity; 
they think of it as a state of mind of sentimental 
people who occupy themselves chiefly in bemoaning 
the sinfulness of the world. Oh how wicked 
everyone is! What terrible power the devil has 
over the lives of men! The world was wicked 
enough before the war, and God afflicted it with 
a very grievous wound for more than four years. 
But instead of repenting of its sins, it seems to 
be worse than ever. Industrial strife, political 
strife, international strife, are bringing Europe 
to its doom. And Christianity is pictured as 
standing by, helplessly weeping and wringing its 
hands over the evil which it can do nothing to 
stop. The Church of Christ watches her sons 
being led into captivity to the world the flesh 
and the devil—Rachel weeping for her children— 
and powerless to save. Some say that Christ 
is Jeremiah. The strong religion of the Son of 
God, which, whether men profess themselves 
Christians or not, inspires and keeps alive every- 
thing in Europe that makes for peace and righteous- 
ness, is supposed to be a pessimistic piety, sad 
and useless. 

And if Christ was not one of these three, John 
the Baptist who stood for repentance and self- 
denial, Elijah for rebuke and punishment, Jeremiah 
for sorrow and weeping, then He was thought 


INTRODUCTION Xlil 


to be some other prophet. Christianity is some 
other sentiment, or idea, or philosophy, by itself 
unsatisfying because incomplete. 

But who say ye that lam? What is Christianity? 
The question has been discussed times without 
number. But yet I think it is the duty of every 
preacher of the Christian Gospel to sketch for 
himself the lines along which he proposes to travel 
to find an answer. It is sometimes said that a 
seed or germ contains potentially all that is in 
the full-grown product. But this is an inaccurate 
use of language. A seed does not grow by un- 
folding what it already contains. The life, the 
self, the psyche of the seed possesses the power of 
taking to itself outside elements, and of adapting 
and co-ordinating them in such a way as to build 
them up into a continuously changing instrument 
of its self-expression, and of discarding elements 
which were formerly useful but have become 
useless. What is identical in the full-grown product 
and in the seed is nothing but the one and the same 
permanent life or self. And the so-called develop- 
ment of doctrine can be thought of as analogous. 
It is the permanent, the persisting essence of Chris- 
tianity progressively expressing itself. What then is 
that essence? Like a seed, it is the product of two 
elements, one of which fertilizes, fructifies the other. 

Our Creed says that Jesus Christ was ‘conceived 
of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.’ That 
statement accurately corresponds to the description 
that we can give of the birth of Christianity. It 
was born of Jewish ancestry; its essence, its very 
self, includes a permanent element derived from 


X1v INTRODUCTION 


its Hebrew past. Jesus Christ was not the Baptist, 
but no less than the Baptist He preached repentance 
and self-denial. He was not Elijah, and yet Elijah 
himself did not recognize more clearly that sin 
brings pains and penalties. And far more than 
Jeremiah, He was a Man of sorrows and acquainted 
with grief because of the guilt and sorrows of men. 
Hebrew morality, obedience to the transcendent 
God who hates sin, was one element which played its 
part in the birth of Christianity, contributing its 
necessary quota to its permanent essence. A so- 
called Christianity in which morality, righteous 
conduct, obedience, are absent, means nothing at 
all. But though born of a Jewish mother, Chris- 
tianity could not come into being without the 
supernatural operation of the Holy Ghost. Morality 
unaided is sterile; it abideth by itself alone, pos- 
sessing no power of upspringing growth and ex- 
pansion. Obedience to law cannot give life. It 
must be rendered productive by the entrance of 
God’s life into mankind, which is what we mean by 
the Incarnation. The product of the divine and 
human elements is Christ in mankind, and that is 
Christianity. It was not rhetoric but an entire 
religious philosophy 7m muce when S. Paul said, 
“To me to live is Christ.’ 

Our difficulty, of course, lies in relating the 
earthly life of Christ to His universal life as the 
spiritual source and centre of the life of all men. 
I think a stumbling-block in the minds of many is 
that they identify humanity with the limitations 
of humanity as we know it. But everything in 
true humanity, everything in the real man, is in 
God. The essence of God is perfect goodness, 


INTRODUCTION XV 


with love as its primary expression, love that can 
sympathize, love that must suffer for others, love 
that redeems. And that essence of God, ‘the 
Character of His Hypostasis,’ as the Epistle to the 
Hebrews puts it, took an individual human per- 
sonality, under the conditions of time and space, 
as the instrument of His Self-expression to men. 
The same passage of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
speaks of the Son of God as ‘the Effulgence of His 
Glory,’ as the light which proceeds from the sun. 
We can have no sight or immediate knowledge of 
sunlight as it is in itself. If we could suppose the 
earth to be surrounded by no atmosphere, sunlight 
would not appear to us as light. It is revealed by 
means of the limitations which the atmosphere 
imposes. It does not cease to be in itself the in- 
visible and unknowable thing that light really is; 
but it is only as passing through the atmosphere 
that it becomes a phenomenon. God’s Essence 
is manifested to men in the Incarnate Christ, and 
without the limitations of time and space He 
‘who dwells in light unapproachable, whom no 
man hath seen or can see,’ would be unknowable. 
The human life of Jesus was the Divine Life re- 
vealed by being conditioned. But because through 
Him the Life of God entered into humanity, and 
because through Him the Love of God suffered 
in order to save, the Divine-Human Christ is the 
Life and Atonement of men. All ‘developments’ 
of doctrine arise from the pressure, the living urge 
of the essence of Christianity for progressive self- 
expression. But the permanent essence is that 
which is born of Hebrew morality fructified by the 
entrance of God Himself. 


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Part I 


1. THE PREPARATION. 


CHRISTIANITY is Christ, and we must ‘consider 
Him’ from His birth and onwards. But before 
doing that, it will be helpful to think of the prepara- 
tion for it in the hearts of His people. In studying 
any life—and the greatest Life is no exception— 
it adds to the understanding of it to see how it 
takes its place historically in the long_ progress 
of the working out of God’s purposes for the world. 
Israel had been gradually guided in the direction 
of the great meaning which Christ’s coming has 
for us. And this movement of thought is summed 
up in a few words in the Benedictus, the song of 
Zachariah (S. Luke 1. 68-79). 

The careful arrangement of the song is not 
always noticed. The singer first states the great 
fact, ‘God hath visited and redeemed His people;’ 
he meant only His people Israel, but we know that 
it includes all who should ever become His people 
in any nation under heaven. That is the Christmas 
message. And He has done so by one of the house, 
the family, of His servant David, one who has been 
‘raised up’ on the stage of history as ‘a horn of 
salvation—a mighty salvation—for us.’ The mean- 
ing of Christ’s coming is stated at the outset— 
Visitation, Redemption, Salvation. 

But then, in the second part of the poem, the 
singer’s thoughts go back behind the present to the 
long divine preparation for the great event. It 


I B 


2 CONCERNING CHRIST 


has often been pointed out that while other nations 
always looked back to a golden age in the past, 
Israel steadily kept their golden age in the future, 
an age which would set in when all nations had 
been conquered, and then God’s chosen people 
would revel in a luxury of peace, wealth, and world- 
wide dominion for ever. And prophet after prophet 
corrected these worldly hopes, and predicted that 
the good time to come would be only when Israel 
had been purified from sin. Not till then would 
they be delivered from their foreign foes and live 
in the happiness of an ideal nation. The singer 
thinks of all this when he says, ‘As He spake by the 
mouth of His holy prophets which have been since 
the world began, that we should be saved from our 
enemies and from the hands of all that hate us.’ 
But the predictions of the prophets were not all. 
He adds ‘to perform mercy with our forefathers, 
and to remember His holy covenant.’ If the 
prophets could be mistaken, God could not, and 
He had promised. The words refer primarily to 
the covenant of circumcision, a binding agreement, 
so to speak, between God and man. And yet to 
make assurance doubly sure he adds, ‘the oath 
which He sware to our forefather Abraham.’ ‘By 
Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, that in thy 
seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ 
And what is this binding covenant and oath? 
Exactly the same as the predictions of all the 
prophets, ‘that He would grant unto us that we 
being delivered out of the hands of our enemies 
might serve Him without fear, in holiness and 
righteousness before Him all the days of our life.’ 


THE PREPARATION 3 


That was the preparation by prophecy, covenant, 
and oath; an age-long hope; ‘the hope of Israel,’ 
as St. Paul calls it; ‘the hope of the promise made 
by God unto our fathers, unto which our twelve 
tribes, earnestly serving God night and day, hope 
to come.’ 

In the next piece of the poem the singer, having 
dealt with the past, returns to the present. We are 
carried from the Old Testament to the New. He 
says to his infant son John, “And thou, child, shalt 
be called the prophet of the Highest, for thou 
shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare His 
way, to give knowledge of salvation unto His people, 
in the remission of their sins.’ The same message, 
the same shining hope—salvation. But John was 
to give knowledge of it; he was to tell people that 
the undying hope was on the verge of being fulfilled, 
that he was preparing the way for the very Saviour 
Himself, 

And so in the last sentences the singer comes 
back to where he started, to the great and wonderful 
fact of Christmas—‘ because of the tender mercy of 
our God, whereby the Dayspring from on High 
hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in 
darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide 
our feet into the way of peace.’ 

We commemorate Easter every Sunday, but also 
every Sunday when we sing the Benedictus we sing 
of Christmas. 

We have now divided the poem into its four 
parts—the statement of the Christmas fact, the 
preparation for it by prophecy, covenant, and oath, 
the message of John the Baptist that the salvation 


4 CONCERNING CHRIST 


was immediately to come, and lastly the re-state- 
ment of the Christmas fact. But we can look at it 
a little more closely, and trace the progress of 
thought which it contains. God revealed His 
truth gradually, in many parts and by many 
methods. And in these twelve verses we see con- 
centrated the whole development of man’s growing 
comprehension of the meaning of salvation. It 
begins with the most simple and primitive notion 
of early Israel. They were possessed by the idea 
that God was only the God of Israel, as the first 
verse of the poem calls Him. The nation and their 
land belonged to Him, and He tothem. He had no 
other care, no other love. Being what He was, He 
was bound to protect them, and to send them a 
king in the house of His servant David, who would 
be a horn of salvation to save them from their 
enemies and from the hands of all that hated them. 
It was a salvation wrought for them. They could 
be entirely passive. Whether their lives were good 
or bad mattered not. Goodness and badness did 
not enter into the scheme. They were a long way 
from the Christian hope. Then came the prophets 
from Amos onwards. They bravely stood forth 
and told them that they were all wrong; that God 
was not merely a fighting Chief; He was a Being of 
moral character, a God of holiness, truth, purity, 
and love. And that the good time to come could 
not come until His nation reached a character like 
His. They must be obedient to His moral com- 
mands; they must be free from murder, adultery, 
stealing, false witness, and all other sins against 
God and against men; and then the hope of Israel 


THE PREPARATION 5 


would be attained. They would serve Him without 
fear, 1% holiness and righteousness before Him all 
the days of their hfe. It was a splendid step in 
advance. Israel drew nearer to God than any other 
nation on earth before Christ came, because their 
ideal rose from national sucess to national righteous- 
ness. And until our ideal does the same—until 
national self-assertion is transcended by national 
uprightness—we have not yet reached even to the 
level of the Hebrew prophets. 

But they had not yet reached the pie e 
hope. Merely to be good, not to do wrong things, 
not to be disobedient to God’s law, is far short of 
the Christian ideal. And so we move on. The 
Christian ideal, and nothing less, we must have, or 
else the divine event of Christmas day was worthless 
and futile. The Christian salvation is not a passive 
deliverance, something wrought for us once and for 
all by the mighty hand of God. And it is not a 
mere being good, obedience to God’s commands. 
It is a living and growing thing. Our salvation is 
not complete until we are complete. And the 
knowledge of salvation taught by John the Baptist 
was the knowledge of something that begins with 
the remission of sins. Christmas, the day of the 
mystery of the Incarnation, was the beginning of 
Christ’s own growing life of obedience, ending with 
the climax of the Cross, And in virtue of that 
Birth, Life, and Death, our salvation begins with 
forgiveness, If anyone were to imagine that 
penitence should be kept for Lent, he would shew 
that he had not grasped the truth that our salvation 
must begin at the beginning. If Christmas has in it 


6 CONCERNING CHRIST 


no penitence, it has no joy. It may have parties 
and presents and feasting and fun, but they are 
mere pagan merriment unless they are made warm 
and fragrant with the joy that comes from the 
remission of sins. 

But that is only the beginning. Our salvation 
is a life-long process; a growth, as Christ’s life 
was a growth from infancy. He is the Dayspring 
from on High, not only to give light to them that sit 
in darkness and in the shadow of death; not only to 
make them come forth from their sins by penitence 
and the virtue of His Atonement; but also to go on 
gradually guiding their feet into the way of peace. 
The world is crying for peace. Each human heart, 
unconsciously if not consciously, is crying for peace. 
And it will find it only when it walks in the light of 
the Incarnate Son of God. 


2. THE CHILD. 


A Baby, tiny, helpless, unconscious. Why does 
He draw to Himself the thoughts of the world? 
Why do men, women, and children, rich and poor, 
learned and unlearned, bow in adoration before 
Him? Every Christian woman would like to 
imagine Him lying in her arms. But let us look 
at Him on the Feast of the Purification, at the 
moment when He was lying in the arms of a man, 
the old and saintly Symeon. The words which he 
spoke will teach us further why Christmas means 
to us what it does. What he said was not all hope 
and joy. He said something which sent the holy 
Mother from the temple with the first beginning of a 
dark shadow upon her soul: ‘Behold, this Child 


THE CHILD 7 


is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel, 
and for a sign that shall be spoken against—yea, 
and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul 
also—that the thoughts of many hearts may be 
revealed.’ The falling of many. The real spiritual 
joy of Christmas is not for everyone. Feasts 
and festivities are not joy. They may be the out- 
ward expression of it, but for many they are a cloak 
hiding unsatisfied desires, restlessness, and sin; 
while for many more they are merely an opportunity 
once a year, under the pretext of a celebration of 
Christ’s birth, of gratifying their animal instincts. 
What were the effects upon the world of the birth 
of Christ? Centuries before it occurred the prophets, 
as we have seen, had told Israel something that 
men found it very hard to understand. Every 
nation in the world, back to the most primitive 
savage tribe, has believed in a God or Gods of some 
sort, and given worship and offered sacrifices in 
order to please them. But the prophets said some- 
thing quite new—that the only way to please God 
was by being good. The primitive man had 
never connected religion with goodness. (For a 
good many people to-day the connexion is not very 
close.) And he was told for the first time that 
sacrifices and ceremonies were worse than useless 
without righteous conduct. But if a prophet had 
been asked, ‘What do you mean by the word 
Good ?’—what could he answer? He could only 
hold out a picture of a good man such as he could 
form in his own mind. All men have some notion 
of goodness; and the prophets, helped by the 
Spirit of God, had the highest notion that anyone 


8 CONCERNING CHRIST 


had ever had up to their time. But that was all. 
It was impossible even for the prophets to picture 
perfect goodness, because no one had ever seen it. 
But on Christmas day perfect goodness was seen 
among men. The Baby was born whose character, 
all through His earthly growth, was the character 
of God. And that is why we worship Him; we 
worship God in Him; we worship Him as God. 
But what were the effects? The first effect was 
that every human character short of that was seen 
to be sinful. If I tried to paint a picture—let us 
say of the divine Child in His Mother’s arms—I 
might, if | were very ignorant and conceited, imagine | 
that my picture was as good as it could be made. 
But if I saw it held up beside Raphael’s Sistine 
Madonna, I should hide my head in shame. So 
the presence of the perfect Ideal stamps every other 
life as sinful. But it had another effect, sad and 
terrible; it made some men sin more. A bad heart 
hates the sight of the perfect Ideal. ‘This is the 
judgment, that light is come into the world, and 
men loved darkness rather than light because their 
deeds were evil.’ ‘They have both seen and hated 
both Me and My Father.’ The life and teaching of 
Jesus Christ were a continual contrast to those of the 
Jews, and therefore a continual rebuke. And it 
drove men to murder Him. This Child is set for 
the falling of many in Israel. 

And that is equally true of many in our own 
country to-day. They are ready enough to join in 
Christmas festivities and amusements; some of them 
are willing to come to Church, perhaps even to come 
to God’s Altar. But they don’t like their sins to 


THE CHILD 9 


be rebuked—their selfishness, temper, untruth, 
uncleanness, or whatever it is. They like their sins, 
or, at any rate, they dislike the labour of over- 
coming them. And the thought of the perfect 
Ideal, from which they are so far removed, only 
irritates and annoys them. To be like Christ means 
a good deal of fighting against their natural self; 
and their natural self is very dear to them. They 
have no real intention of doing anything except 
go on as they have gone on for years. And to goon 
means to get worse. They don’t feel as if they 
were getting worse, because they feel little that does 
not affect their bodily senses; but they are in fact 
storing their inmost soul with more and more sin. 
Christmas to such a person is a terrible thing. He 
has been brought face to face with the Ideal born 
into human life, and he rejects it. And that must 
lower a man. This Child is set for the falling of 
many. Every Christmas lowers the man who is not 
really sorry for his sins, and therefore has no real 
wish to be forgiven them, or intention of fighting 
them. 

But then we can turn and look at the other side 
of the picture. What does Christmas mean to 
those who are sorry for their sins, and are trying to 
get into closer union with the Son of God? 


Ah! this 
Nor tongue nor pen can show. 
The love of Jesus what it is 
None but His loved ones know. 


This Child is set for the rising up of many. The old 
Hebrew thinker who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes 


10 CONCERNING CHRIST 


complained that there was nothing new under the 
sun. But he lived some two centuries before the 
event of Christmas day. And that was something 
absolutely new, a new power among men, a new 
presence, a new life,a new motive. Many of us will 
admit that we are like a man whose strength and 
vitality have been lowered by illness. But if he will 
only take the right medicines, and eat the right 
food, and get into fresh air, he can probably be up 
and strong again with the buoyant vigour of a healthy 
man. Our sins and mistakes have dragged us down, 
and made our souls weaker and more helpless. 
But Christmas brings us the message that we can, 
with perfect certainty, be restored to health. If 
we will accept the strength of Christ, and be brave 
enough to discipline and deny ourselves, and breathe 
the fresh air of His Spirit by prayer and by learning 
from His Word, and eat and drink the life-giving 
food of His Body and Blood, we can conquer our 
old, old sins, and live such a life as we have never 
lived before. This Child is set for the rising up of 
many who have fallen in the past; and we can be of 
the number. Don’t wait for the beginning of the 
civil year to make a fresh start. The presence of 
Christ, who was brought to us at Christmas, can do 
it for you now. 

But there are many also—and I write this in 
Ireland—who have been brought low by trouble, 
disappointment, terror, depression, loneliness. This 
Child is set for their rising again to new hope, to a 
new and satisfying certainty that this life is not the 
life that matters; that those who have gone from us 
have only gone a little way out of sight, and that we 


THE SEARCH II 


shall again rejoice with them, because the life of 
Christ Incarnate is in them as in us. When we are 
depressed it is mostly our body that makes us so. 
But nothing that happens in this world can be of 
any particular consequence to those who have 
Christ in them, the hope of glory. The birth of 
Christ at Christmas can yet bring to Ireland, and 
to the world, joy and peace and unity and holiness, 
because this Child is set for the rising up of many 
out of their sorrows and pains, their mistakes and 
sins. So when the angels sing to us, ‘ Glory to God 
in the Highest,’ it is a call to lift up our hearts. 
And whether we have been sinful, or whether we 
have been sorrowful, when we hear the call we can 
answer with a new meaning and a joyful intention, 
‘We lift them up unto the Lord.’ 


3. THE SEARCH. 


To a few persons the presence of the Child was 
known, but others had to search for Him. The 
wise men knew that it was a Baby that they wanted 
to find, but they knew also that He was born as 
King. And so they came expecting to see a 
magnificent palace, all minarets and domes and 
pillars and porticoes, standing in beautiful grounds 
rich with ancient trees and decked with the choicest 
flowers. They expected to see numbers of pampered 
slaves, waiting about to attend the nobles of the 
court and the guests of the royal house. They 
expected to see a brilliant throng of visitors passing 
in and out of the gates, come to bring gifts of 
homage to the King. They found the Baby, but it 
was in the very last place where any sane man 


12 CONCERNING CHRIST ~ 


would expect to find a King—in a manger, in a 
stable, at the back of a small village inn, some miles 
outside the city walls. 

The story of Bethlehem has a glamour and a 
radiance that never seem to grow blurred or faded, 
however many years we live to hear it. But as 
flowers yield their scent more richly at one time of 
the day than at another, so we feel that it is at 
Christmas that we chiefly love to hear the story. 
Its fragrance somehow seems less if we hear it, for 
example, in the middle of the summer. What we 
must do, therefore, is to distil from it its divine 
meaning, that we may carry it with us as a sweet 
essence all the year long. The meaning of the birth 
of Christ is not only that God sent His Son into the 
world to die for our sins. It is, indeed, true that 
He who was laid in the manger by the high road 
outside the city was also laid upon the Cross by the 
high road outside the city. But Christmas is more 
than the first necessary step towards Good Friday. 
Because God was in Christ, as S. Paul says, He was 
in mankind; and because Christ is alive and not dead, 
He is still in mankind. What we have to do is to 
look for Him, as the wise men and the shepherds 
looked for Him. And when we search we shall find 
Him in all kinds of unexpected places and conditions. 
He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, 
but sometimes in very surprising ways. And of 
this the Christmas story is a symbol. 

For instance, the stable, which we surround, of 
course, with a halo of loving imagination, must have 
been, in fact, a very uncomfortable place. Christian 
art has made it beautiful, adding mild-looking oxen 


THE SEARCH 13 


and sheep, and perhaps some doves. But the stable 
of a village inn was probably nothing but the 
roughest little shanty, where they kept a donkey or 
two to carry necessaries from the Jerusalem markets 
for use in the inn. Let us translate the symbol. 
Is there anything—except pain and violent death— 
is there anything from which most of us shrink more 
than from physical discomfort? But when things 
are uncomfortable, wise men will find Christ there. 
Some people have to bear much more discomfort in 
their homes than they allow their visitors to know 
about. And if they do not make a right“use of it, 
it can go far to spoil their characters. It makes 
them irritable and bad-tempered; they are con- 
stantly having to put up with things that annoy 
them, things that are not their fault—very often 
they are not anybody’s fault, but just circumstances; 
and they grumble, and feel horrid, and take every 
discomfort as a fresh injury. Discomfort seems the 
very last condition in which we might expect Christ 
to be found. But it was exactly there that the wise 
men found Him, in a sordid, dirty, draughty little 
shed. Look for the Incarnate Christ as present with 
you in your discomforts, and you will be able to give 
glory to the King of Kings. 

And then there are other people who will say, It 
is not that my physical surroundings are specially 
uncomfortable, but my life issocramped. I have to 
stay at home looking after aged parents or an 
invalid; I have to spend the whole of my time doing 
things which haven’t a spark of interest; I have to 
go every day and sit for hours in a stuffy office, 
writing or typing; I have to sit and sew; I have to 


14 CONCERNING CHRIST 


sweep, or cook, or wash; I have to stand behind a 
counter and sell things to troublesome people; I 
have to teach dull and uninteresting children. If 
I could only be free to enjoy real life, to expand 
with real] interests; if I could only spend my time 
on something important or exciting or permanently 
useful, instead of this daily round and common task, 
without which I could not get the necessaries of life. 
Oh, if I only had enough money to be able to enjoy 
myself whenever I liked and as much as [I liked! 
But instead of that, my life is tied and cramped and 
bound like—what shall we say? like a little Eastern 
Baby, 
All meanly wrapped in swaddling bands, 
And in a manger laid. 


I beseech you this Christmas to set to work to find 
Christ there. Call your life a prison if you wish; 
but, like Paul and Silas, if you have Christ with you, 
you can sing hymns in prison, and spiritually the 
doors will burst wide open, and your soul will be as 
free as the wind, though your body remains tied 
and bound. ‘ Lord, Thou hast brought my soul out 
of prison.” ‘I will run the way of Thy command- 
ments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.’ 

But it is not only for the discomforts and the 
cramping limitations of life that our parable holds 
good. By the Incarnation the Son of God came 
not only into human surroundings, but into man- 
kind. He came to renew the divine Image in every 
human being, and'therefore we'ought to look for Him 
in every human being. It is astonishing enough 
that He was to be found in the form of a Baby. 
But isn’t it much more astonishing that He can be 


THE SEARCH 15 


found in some of the men and women whom we 
know? But it is in them that we have to look for 
Him. The love that believeth all things, and 
hopeth all things, believeth that Christ is hidden in 
hearts where He might be least expected, and hopeth 
to find Him there. Europe is still yearning for 
peace on earth; and while it is the bounden duty 
of Christians to strive towards it by every means in 
their power, nothing will do it more surely than the 
divinely given sympathy which can find, or at least 
believe in, the presence of Christ in every man. In 
very different degrees no doubt. In some hearts the 
Divine is as tiny and weak and inchoate as a Baby; 
in others the Christ is being steadily ‘ formed,’ as 
S. Paul puts it, and has so grown that His presence is 
perceptible at a glance. But it is just the glorious 
message of Christmas that it is the Baby that we 
must look for! If you love everyone, you will find 
Him in all, and treat them accordingly. You will 
learn to say, ‘ The Christ who lay in the manger lies, 
after all, in the heart of that man or woman whom 
I have always disliked, or feared, or despised; in that 
person who tries my patience, or who seems to rouse 
all that is worst in me. Surely the Lord is in that 
heart, and I knew it not.’ The person in whom 
the Christ lies hidden as an ungrown Infant will not 
advertise or display Him; there will be no star in the 
sky to guide you. Nothing but sympathy will do 
it, the sympathy that is born of love; the sympathy 
which helps you to understand what other people 
must be feeling even in circumstances in which you 
have never been placed; which helps you to recog- 
nize what is on the surface, and due to external 


16 CONCERNING CHRIST 


difficulties and influences, and to distinguish it from 
the real person within; which helps you to pray for 
them, to be interested in them, even when they appear 
to be uninteresting or even past praying for. If Christ 
loves them well enough to come as the Dayspring 
from the High to visit them, cannot the Christian 
love them well enough to try and discover Him? 

For a Christmas message, then, we can take the 
words out of Herod’s mouth, ‘Go and search dili- 
gently for the young Child.’ Nothing that we can do 
will more surely bring glory to God in the Highest 
and on earth peace. 


4. EPIPHANY. 


The word ‘Epiphany,’ as everyone knows, can 
be translated ‘Manifestation’; but that does not 
fully express its meaning. In the New Testament it 
is used not only of our Lord’s manifestation at His 
first coming on the earth, but also, and more 
frequently, of His second coming at the last day. 
It is found in contemporary writings of the arrival 
in splendour and pomp of a king or emperor or 
some other illustrious person. When he visited a 
country town, many of the inhabitants would see 
him for the first time. And it was used, with 
an extended meaning, of the accession of the 
Emperor Caligula to the throne; he publicly arrived 
on the stage of history as the supreme head of the 
empire. And these meanings can be seen in the 
Christian use of the word. Christ’s second coming was 
expected with the outward insignia of majesty; but 
His first coming, although they were absent, was the 
arrival of our King and God, so that men could see 


EPIPHANY 17 


Him for the first time. And He began His reign 
over the hearts of those who accepted Him. 

Here the Bethlehem story offers itself again as a 
symbol for ouruse. He arrived and reigned first in 
the heart of His blessed Mother, who had accepted 
Him when she said, ‘Behold the handmaid of the 
Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’ And 
then in the heart of S. Joseph. But after He had 
come to them, we are told that He was sought out 
and worshipped by wise men from the East. And 
that represents the history of the reception of the 
divine King into the hearts of men ever since. 

In the first place His mother and S. Joseph were 
Jews, while the magi were Gentiles. That was the 
order in which Christianity made each of its early 
steps. Our Lord confined His ministry to His own 
nation; but His first disciples, who were all Jews, 
started out to preach the Gospel to every creature. 
At first they also were busy in Palestine, and shrank 
from admitting uncircumcised Gentiles to their 
number. But S. Paul won the victory of their 
liberty, and every Gentile Christian to-day is reaping 
the fruits of his large-heartedness. And now it is 
the turn of the Gentile so to proclaim the arrival of 
the King in His beauty that the Jew may return, 
and, as S. Paul said, be grafted in again. 

But the story is symbolic from another point of 
view. Joseph, the village carpenter, was a poor man, 
while the magi were rich, for they could travel, and 
offer valuable gifts to the King. The poor came first. 
And that is the normal order of the King’s reception. 
When John the Baptist wanted to be sure that our 
Lord was ‘ He that should come,’ his messengers were 


Cc 


18 CONCERNING CHRIST 


bidden to go and tell him that ‘to the poor the 
Gospel is preached.’ Christ proclaimed with 
startling utterances which He purposely made 
startling in order to rouse and move His hearers, 
“Blessed are ye poor,’ “Woe unto you rich.’ And 
we can see every day that His words contain a 
large amount of very literal meaning. Money can 
buy much that human nature hankers after, 
luxury and amusement, leisure and titles; but it 
can buy also what is the moral ruin of so many, 
the deference, the flattery, the popularity, which 
the poor man seldom gets, and the rich man mostly 
loses in the twinkling of an eye if he becomes poor. 
All this is so apt to tie men’s thoughts to earth, and 
to engross them with the ‘pride of life,’ that it is, 
as a patent and obvious fact, exceedingly difficult for 
a rich man or woman to enter into the Kingdom of 
Heaven. Extreme poverty, of course, can engross 
those who suffer from it quite as terribly as wealth. 
But poverty is not a condition which naturally 
leads to self-satisfaction; and it is self-satisfaction 
more than anything else in the world which makes 
the eyes blind, and the ears deaf, and dulls the 
conscience, and drugs the soul to sleep. It is 
easier for the poor man than for the rich to find 
the King of Kings. 

Look at the story again. The holy Mother and 
5. Joseph, who were unlearned, saw the King before 
the wise men skilled in the mathematics and 
astrology of their day. The magi were, for the 
age in which they lived, really learned men. It 
was in the pursuit of their learned profession that 
they saw the star which led them to the Child. 


EPIPHANY 19 


But He was known first to the simple villagers from 
Nazareth. And for some time in the history of 
the Church the knowledge of God in Christ was 
hidden from the wise and prudent, while it was 
revealed unto babes. The Twelve were unlearned 
and ignorant men, but they knew Christ before 
Saul of Tarsus the pupil of Gamaliel. As S. Paul 
himself said, ‘Not many wise, not many mighty, 
not many noble are called.’ Slaves in Caesar’s 
household were Christians two centuries and a half 
before Constantine the first Christian _ Emperor. 
And so it has always been. The Christian religion 
throughout the world has normally penetrated 
upwards from the masses. 

But underlying this there is a principle which is 
of force in the spiritual history of each of us. The 
trained intellect can bring its homage to Christ, 
but not till Christ has been revealed to the heart 
through the simplicity of faith. It is easier for the 
unlearned to accept the King than for the learned— 
not because the learned can discover that the 
Christian religion will not bear investigation, as 
some of them seem to think, but—because the un- 
learned cannot grasp or realize its greatness and 
complexity. A man’s religion is, indeed, nobler 
and more complete when his intellect does homage 
as well as his emotions and his will, when he can love 
God with his mind as well as with his heart and soul 
and strength. It is a higher and a harder stage; 
and many of the world’s ablest thinkers have failed 
to reach it. But tust because faith is easier to the 
unlearned, it is a fact of common experience that 
the first necessary elements of the revelation of 


20 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Christ come to them sooner than to the wise. 
The carpenter sees Christ before the magi. And 
all who belong to the educated class must reach 
the revelation in the corresponding order. If our 
intellect has not yet done homage, it is because 
we have not begun with simple faith. If we try 
first to prove the things of Christ by argument, 
we shall never prove them at all. But if our love is 
lavished upon the divine Man before we have taken 
steps to prove anything about Him, if we first learn 
by living experience that He satisfieth the empty 
soul and filleth the hungry soul with goodness, 
then we can keep ourselves safely bound to Him 
by the cords of love while our groping intellect is 
slowly finding its way, like the magi, from afar. 
Yet once more. The carpenter and his espoused 
wife lived in Western Syria. And it was after 
they knew the King that there came wise men from 
the East. God has chosen to reveal Himself in 
Christ to the West before the East. The Day- 
spring from on High hath visited us. The physical 
order is reversed in the spiritual; the Sun has 
risen in the West, and the East, after nineteen 
centuries, is still in early twilight. Two thoughts 
suggest themselves with regard to the mission 
field. When the East found the King for the first 
time, it offered to Him the products of the East, 
gold, frankincense, and myrrh. To save souls 
is not the one and only object of missionary work. 
The East has treasures of thought and character 
that Christ wants, treasures without which the 
Body of Christ is incomplete. It is in order that 
the Church of Christ may grow nearer to being 


THE BOY 21 


perfectly catholic that we want to get for it the 
special contributions that Persia, India, China, 
and Japan can make. And the other thought is 
closely connected with this. If we could imagine 
someone going to the magi, and trying to persuade 
them to come to Bethlehem by arguments, let us 
say, from Messianic prophecy, can we suppose that 
they would have come? What brought them was 
something in their own region of thought, something 
which appealed to them and not to the West, the 
star which they discovered in their astrological 
observations. The millions of the East must be 
drawn by methods many of which are quite foreign 
to us. And for that purpose it must be our first 
and chiefest aim to build up native ministries, 
who will make their own Churches along their 
own lines of thought and temperament. If the 
Christianity of the East is alive, it must grow as a 
plant in its own soil. And our prayer must be that 
Christ, Incarnate in His Body the Church, may be 
so revealed that Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, 
learned and unlearned, East and West, may learn 
alike the joy of His Epiphany. 


5. THE Boy. 


This chapter is about children, the immeasurably 
important people on whom the management of 
the world will rest in a few years. As Jesus was 
presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, 
so we want to present our boys and girls to be the 
instruments in the hand of God for working out 
His purposes. We might perhaps imagine the 
sort of prayers that the holy Mother poured out 


22 CONCERNING CHRIST 


for her Son; but however high and far-reaching 
were her petitions, God gave her more than she 
could ask or think in the unimaginable perfection 
of His life. What prayers are we going to offer 
for our sons and daughters? We could not ask 
anything better than that their character in child- 
hood may be like that of the Captain of their 
salvation. 

For the study of His childhood we are entirely 
dependent on S. Luke. There was an early tradition 
in the Church that S. Luke was a painter. Whether 
that is true or not, he was certainly an artist with 
his pen. He exhibits one of the sure marks of 
artistic genius; he was able in a very few simple 
strokes to give a living portrait. Two short 
sentences, and one short story, and that is all; 
but it is enough to provide an example to every boy 
and girl to the end of time. 

Jesus ‘increased in stature.’ The evangelist 
was much too good an artist to waste ink on an 
unnecessary sentence, and yet he took the trouble 
to mention our Lord’s physical growth. Physical 
growth does not lie outside the range of religion. 
God has given us our bodies, and therefore S. Paul 
says, ‘Glorify God in your bodies, which are His.’ 
We can imagine for ourselves the hardy, frugal 
life of the son of a village carpenter among the 
hills of Galilee. And what it helped to make Him 
we can see later on in the Gospels. Have you 
ever thought how strong and healthy He must have 
been? A delicate man could not have walked from 
village to village, in all weathers, for months 
together, with nowhere to lay His head, working 


THE BOY 23 


hard all day, sometimes without leisure even for 
meals, with the nervous strain of preaching to 
crowds with an intense longing to influence and 
help them, and power going out of Him, as He said, 
with every miracle of healing that He performed. 
And then, at the end of the day, He could do with 
little sleep, and often spent the greater part of the 
night in prayer on the hillside. And when we 
come to the story of His last hours, we see: that 
His body must have possessed an iron strength. 
Think of all that He went through on the night of 
His betrayal; no sleep but agonized prayer and 
struggle; then the arrest with its rough handling, 
the brutal treatment afterwards from the high 
priest’s servants, the standing at one trial] after 
another next morning without food or drink, so 
far as we are told, the painful mocking by the 
soldiers, the smiting on the head and the crown of 
thorns. And far worse than all, except the cruci- 
fixion itself, was the scourging. A Roman scourging 
was a thing too awful to be described; it is enough 
to say that it often killed men outright, even when 
they had not been utterly wearied beforehand. 
Think of the mental and therefore physical strain 
of keeping Himself perfectly in hand through it all; 
“when He was reviled, He reviled not again; when 
He suffered He threatened not.’ And with all this 
He was still able to stand after it during the mocking 
by the soldiers, and then to walk all the way to 
Calvary, and part of the way to carry the heavy 
beam of wood to which His hands were to be nailed. 
May we not say that He glorified God in His body 
by sheer physical health and endurance? And 


24 CONCERNING CHRIST 


everything that is done for boys and girls as regards 
their physical welfare can be, and ought to be, 
undertaken with a spiritual object—to make their 
bodies as fit as they can be, that they may bring 
glory to God. 

Jesus increased in stature. But He ‘increased’ 
also ‘in wisdom’. The story of His visit to the 
temple at the age of twelve, when the Jewish 
teachers were surprised at His understanding and 
answers, shews that His wisdom was partly book- 
wisdom. And if children want to be like Him, they 
will do their school lessons as hard and carefully 
as they can, not only in order to get on, and pass 
examinations, and win prizes for their own gratifica- 
tion and scholarships for that of their parents, but 
with the one great object of glorifying God with 
their minds. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy mind,’ and we must please Him by 
dedicating to His service the whole of us. But in 
particular, the Boy Jesus shewed in the temple that 
He had read His Bible. The writer of this volume 
has been teaching Divinity students for more than 
a quarter of a century, and he has found during that 
time that the number of those who come to their 
theological training with the least pretensions to 
any serious knowledge of Scripture is very small 
indeed. Do make your children read their Bible, 
and learn lots of it by heart. We cannot measure 
what it will do for them. But first and foremost 
it will be an imitation of the Boy Jesus. 

Body and mind are two of God’s great gifts. 
But of course there is something greater and deeper 
—that wonderful thing that we call character. 


THE BOY 25 


Look again at S. Luke’s rapid sketch. Jesus 
‘increased in favour with men.’ He was a perfectly 
delightful Boy. I like to think of Him full of fun 
and laughter, keeping every one in a good humour, 
and playing games with other children in the 
market-place, such as He afterwards spoke of 
when He was grown up. Can you imagine a boy 
growing in favour with men without any fun and 
laughter? And why we should imagine, as some 
people do, that in after years he gave them up, 
and was always solemn, I cannot think. He 
must have attracted every decent-minded person 
in the place. Everyone must have been struck 
by the splendid goodness that radiated in His 
healthy face, the utter truth and purity that shone 
in His thoughtful eyes. The tongues of men and 
angels could not describe what that Boy must have 
been, an arresting Presence in the small country 
town where everyone knew Him intimately; never 
conceited or forward, never rough, thoughtless, 
or unkind, never lazy, never disobedient, never 
unclean; a Boy without a fault. Most people, if 
they heard to-day of a boy without a fault, would 
probably pronounce him a prig. But if he was a 
prig, it would be because he had a fault, and a bad 
one. This was a Boy entirely free from the 
peculiarly obnoxious fault of being a prig. 

But I should like to dwell for a moment longer 
on two points. If there is one thing that will 
make a child increase in favour with other people 
more surely than anything else, it is to be helpful. 
Our Lord’s ministry when He grew up was in very 
truth a ‘ministry’—service to others. ‘The Son 


26 CONCERNING CHRIST 


of Man is come not to be ministered unto but to 
minister.’ ‘I am among you as He that serveth.’ 
And I am quite sure that that did not begin when 
He was grown up. If the child is father of the 
man, He must have learned increasingly to be 
helpful from the first moment that He could help 
anyone. Do teach your children to be helpful. 
Be constantly helpful yourself, and expect it from 
them, and you will get it naturally and easily if you 
begin when they are young enough. Christ has 
placed in His Church ‘first apostles, secondly 
prophets, thirdly teachers, then powers, gifts of 
healing, helps, &c.’ An important part of His great 
work in the world is done by the young, the hidden, 
the humble people who help. And no child can be 
like the Boy Jesus if he is not trying to be a help in 
as many ways as he can every day. 

But beside our Lord’s helpfulness, and other 
beautiful characteristics, by which He grew in favour 
with men, S. Luke in one sentence gives us what 
many children find the hardest thing in the world 
to imitate. On returning to Nazareth with His 
parents ‘He was subject unto them.’ Obedience; 
quick, immediate, cheerful, voluntary obedience 
at home. Boys and girls will usually obey a school 
teacher, or a scout or guide officer without much 
difficulty; and all discipline is good. But to be 
just as willingly obedient at home—that is often 
the really hard thing, and the really Christlike 
thing. And our Lord was obedient not only while 
He was a small child, but the whole thirty years 
that He lived at home. What about our boys of 
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen? When they are 


THE BOY 27 


just beginning to grow into young men is the time 
when they are beginning to be most in need of the 
great strength of God to keep them imitating the 
young Man Jesus. 

What a picture we have before us! But S. Luke 
has one more stroke in his inspired portrait. Jesus 
‘increased in favour with God’. He was always, 
since His birth, the Beloved Son in whom the 
Father was well pleased; but still He had to grow 
in favour with Him. He had small temptations 
when He was a Child, and He resisted_them all; 
He had harder temptations as He grew older, and 
still He resisted them all. He had to learn to say 
His prayers to begin with, like any other small 
child; but His prayers grew in depth and intensity 
and wideness of range as He grew older, and learnt 
by increasing experience what prayer meant, and 
what it could do. And He grew in love to God 
and to men. At each moment His love was perfect 
for that stage of His life. But it went on growing 
with His growth, until it became the mighty love 
of the Man on the Cross. 

Let us pray for our sons and daughters that they 
also may grow in favour with men by joy and 
helpfulness and obedience, and in favour with God 
by a growing strength against growing temptation, 
by the increasing width and depth of their prayers, 
and the increasing width and depth of their love, 
that the same mind may be in them which was also 
in Christ Jesus. 


28 CONCERNING CHRIST 


6. THE IMAGE OF GOD. 


Up to this point we have allowed ourselves for 
the most part to dwell in simple meditation on the 
beginnings of the perfect life. And we might dwell 
much longer, for the Protevangelium in the opening 
chapters of S. Matthew and S. Luke is inexhaustible 
in symbol and significance. But the longer we 
pause upon the threshold, the more insistent 
becomes the question, what manner of Man is this, 
whose presence fills human history, and who calls 
for the homage and self surrender of all mankind? 
Needless to say, this chapter will not help to solve 
the Mystery of Christ, a task in which the theologians 
of all the centuries have failed. But it is important 
that we should try to understand, as clearly as we 
can, what the problem is, and what it is not. This 
little volume is not a theological treatise, but here 
and there in the course of it we must put off our 
shoes from off our feet as we face the deepest and 
greatest things of our faith. 

The first thing to be clear about is that the mani- 
festing of God in human life was not simply a 
stupendous miracle, standing all by itself, in 
supreme isolation from the rest of history, but the 
climax of a series. In the beginning God created 
the heavens and the earth. And He did it by slow 
degrees. All matter is an expression of His activity, 
but vegetables, being endued with life, are a better 
expression of it than anything inanimate, and 
animals better still, and man far better than any 
of them. Man, as the highest animal, came at the 
top of the scale, immeasurably superior to all that 


THE IMAGE OF GOD 29 


was below him, because he alone was made ‘in 
the Image of God.’ But he alone failed in his 
destiny. Nothing beneath him failed; inanimate 
matter, vegetables, and animals, so far as their own 
action is concerned, are all without exception 
exactly what God intends them to be. Not one of 
them has ever crossed His wishes, or broken His 
laws, because not one of them has ever been capable 
of doing so. Not one of them possesses the power 
which is man’s glory and ruin, and of which he 
makes use to turn round and reject and thwart and 
grieve and disobey the God who made him.~ It is the 
possession of that power which makes man ‘but 
little less than divine’ (as it is said in Psalm viii. 5), 
and puts all things under his feet as regards the 
scale of being. But if man is the climax of creation, 
it is impossible to think that man as we know him 
in his weakness and sin can be the final goal which 
God had in view. The fact of a rising scale makes 
it certain that He intended a real and complete 
climax. Man is, indeed, the final goal, but it must 
be Man without weakness and sin, Man infinitely 
perfect. And we find a picture of Him in the New 
Testament, the Firstborn (or Chief-born) of all 
creation, the Effulgence of God’s Glory, the Impress 
of His Essence, the Image of the invisible God, 
Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Let us look at this word Image a little more 
closely. We are accustomed, for the most part, 
to use it of a figure of stone or metal, or of a picture. 
We sometimes say that a son is the very image of his 
father; but even then we usually refer to his out- 
ward, material form and features. The word, 


30 CONCERNING CHRIST 


unfortunately, is not often used of things inward 
and spiritual. But suppose that a son had the 
same likes and dislikes as his father to a marked 
extent; the father is musical and the son is musical; 
the father is a cricketer and the son is a cricketer; 
the father is kindhearted and the son is kindhearted; 
—if it were part of our ordinary language to say 
that in this or that respect the son is the image of 
his father, we should be much nearer the meaning 
that we want. God is Spirit; God is Truth; God is 
Love. And He made man in His Image, that is, 
He made him such that he possessed the possibilities 
of becoming more and more like God, of growing 
towards the ideal of being His very Image. But all 
men failed except One. And because He was perfect 
as His Father in Heaven is perfect, He was the 
Image—He was not only made ‘in His Image,’ 
He was the Image—of His Father, the exact 
repliqua of His Father’s perfection. ‘The Father 
is God and the Son is God.’ ‘He that hath seen 
Me hath seen the Father.’ 

We learn, then, that it is personal quality by 
which man can exhibit what God is like; it is in 
personal quality that he can grow towards being 
His Image. And the tendency to forget this has 
caused most of the difficulties which are felt about 
the Incarnation. Some have rejected it because 
others have maintained strange and impossible 
notions about it. Many people to-day would like 
to believe it. They are told that Christianity is 
the religion of the Incarnation, and stands or falls 
with it. They shrink from giving up the central 
doctrine of the faith of nineteen centuries. And 


THE IMAGE OF GOD 31 


yet their intellectual honesty forces them to doubt 
it, because they think it means what it doesn’t 
really mean at all. They think it means, for 
example, that the infinite God was transformed 
by some incomprehensible miracle into a man without 
ceasing to be God, so that the man, walking the 
roads and fields of Palestine, could do everything 
that God could do. Or that God dwelt in a human 
body, and so dominated and swamped the human 
personality that for all practical purposes there was 
no manhood left. Or—and this is a commoner 
mistake than the other two—that the Godhead 
and the manhood were two distinct and separate 
things or entities which somehow dwelt together— 
either fused or placed side by side—in a human 
body, so that on some occasions it was the divine 
Nature that acted, as when He did His miracles, 
and at others the human, as when He was tired or 
sorrowful or in pain. Anyone of these does away 
with the completeness of His humanity. And 
many who hear them think, ‘I can’t believe that; 
and anyone who says he can must be either blindly 
credulous, or insincere. I wonder how many 
people think that Christians, and the clergy es- 
pecially, live in a condition of more or less conscious 
insincerity. Let me say at once that any clergy- 
man who does not, in his heart of hearts, believe 
that God was manifested in human life in Christ 
Jesus, ought not to be a clergyman at all. But 
what has been said shews that there are more ways 
of explaining that manifestation than some people 
have any idea of. I think it may be claimed that 
the clergy, generally speaking, are not insincere, 


32 CONCERNING CHRIST 


and that the difficulty lies in the minds of those 
who criticize them. 

We can first put the difficulty in a sentence, and 
then examine it. It is commonly thought that if 
Jesus Christ was the exhibition, the Epiphany, of 
God, He must have exhibited all the attributes 
that we ascribe to God. For instance, we say, 
expressing a real truth, that God is everywhere; 
we ascribe to Him the attribute of omnipresence. 
‘If I climb up into heaven Thou art there; if I go 
down to Hades Thou art there also; if I take the 
wings of the morning and remain in the uttermost 
parts of the sea, even there also shall Thy hand 
lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.’ In 
all the great universe the life and activity of God 
find their self-expression. But the human Jesus, 
a Man with a physical body, was not omnipresent. 
When He lay in the manger His body was in the 
manger and nowhere else; and when He hung upon 
the Cross, it was on the Cross and nowhere else. 
No one would pretend to imagine for a moment 
that Jesus, the Infant, the Boy, or the Man, was 
omnipresent. But if God is not omnipresent He 
is not God. (Not that He is extended in space, 
but all that exists is the expression of His mind and 
will.) And yet we hold that Jesus Christ revealed 
Him perfectly. The moment we think of the 
matter carefully it becomes self-evident that the 
Incarnation did not mean the acquiring by a 
human being of all the divine attributes. 

Take another. Read such passages as the 4oth 
chapter of \Isaiah, or the ro4th Psalm, or the four 
chapters in which God answered Job out of the 


THE IMAGE OF GOD 33 


whirlwind (chaps. 38-41), and see what the Hebrew 
writers felt about the power of God in Nature. 
And think further what modern astronomy, and 
physics, and chemistry, and geology, and all the 
other physical sciences have taught us of the in- 
conceivable vastness of His power in the guiding 
and ruling of matter. And we are not going to 
ascribe that power to an Infant in swaddling 
clothes, or to a Boy of twelve, or to a Man of thirty. 
Our Lord did wonderful things when He was on 
earth that we call miracles; but so did the apostles 
afterwards. He and they did them because God 
the Father gave them the power to do them for His 
divine purposes. It is entirely true in both cases 
to say that God did them. But that is not the same 
as saying that the human Jesus was what is com- 
monly called omnipotent. The human Jesus was 
a helpless Infant; quite literally helpless. When 
He was a Boy of twelve, and a Man of thirty, His 
control of the forces of Nature was that of a Boy of 
twelve and a Man of thirty, and no more. The 
Incarnation did not mean that because He revealed 
God He was keeping the unnumbered worlds, and 
the unnumbered systems of worlds whirling in their 
circuits through space. And yet there was not a 
moment of His earthly life in which the words 
were not true, ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
Father.’ 

He was not, then, omnipresent, and He was not 
omnipotent. Now look at one more attribute that 
we ascribe to God—omniscience. If you were 
asked this question: When our Lord was an Infant 
in swaddling clothes, could He know all the 


D 


34 CONCERNING CHRIST 


languages in the world, past, present, and future ?>— 
I don’t mean, of course, speak them out aloud, 
because He couldn’t speak a word; He could only 
cry like any other baby.—But were all the languages 
throughout the world’s history present to His con- 
sciousness? You would at once say, No. He 
couldn’t even understand what His Mother said to 
Him as she crooned some Eastern lullaby to send 
Him to sleep. Could He, as He lay in her arms, 
or at any other time in His life, understand all the 
philosophies and religious systems, all the natural 
sciences, the ingenuities, machineries, and con- 
trivances that ever had been or ever would be 
studied or invented by the mind of man? Could 
He know in detail every thought, every dream, every 
transient feeling of every human being, past, 
present, and future? To ask such questions is 
absurd; and it is something more than absurd when 
we read in the New Testament that He ‘grew in 
wisdom.’ Nothing less than I have described can 
be called Omniscience, and that is an attribute that 
we ascribe to God. But Omniscience does not 
grow in wisdom. Jesus asked questions. And He 
was sometimes surprised; when He heard, for 
instance, the centurion’s answer, ‘He marvelled.’ 
But Omniscience cannot marvel, and has no need 
to ask questions. And He Himself said, ‘Of that 
day and that hour knoweth no man, not even the 
angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ 
In other words, He explicitly declared, ‘Omniscience 
knows of the day and hour, but I donot.’ Isn’tita 
strange thing that many Christians, who are quite 
ready to admit that Jesus in His earthly life was 


THE IMAGE OF GOD 35 


not omnipresent and not omnipotent, are terrified 
if you suggest that He was not omniscient, even 
though He said so Himself! It is the old mistake. 
They have formed an idea for themselves that the 
Incarnation involved the possession of divine 
attributes; and then they accuse you of denying our 
Lord’s Divinity if you point out, what the New 
Testament teaches as clearly as words can do it, 
that He did not possess the three great attributes 
which are inseparable from our conception of the 
Being of God. ~ 

What then do we mean when we say that Jesus 
Christ was the Image of God, the perfect human 
Reproduction of what God is? It is impossible to 
press too strongly the fact that God’s attributes 
are not God. The truth of this becomes at once 
clear if we compare such an expression as ‘God is 
Omnipresence’ with the New Testament declaration 
that ‘Godis Love.’ The former conveys no meaning 
at all. But the moment that you introduce the 
thought of quality and character you reach the idea 
of Personality. Perfect love on the negative side 
means Sinlessness, because all sin is the assertion of 
self, and on the positive side it means Self-giving, 
Self-imparting, Self-sharing, Self-sacrifice. All 
Christ’s miracles and teaching were not Himself; 
they were necessarily subject to human limitations; 
He was not omnipotent, and, as He said Himself, 
He was not omniscient. But it was Himself that 
was the Revelation, the Epiphany, the Image of 
God, His entire Personality, His Sinlessness and 
His Love. 

At this point some may raise an important 


36 CONCERNING CHRIST 


objection. If Christ’s knowledge was subject to 
limitations, how can we be sure that He was ab- 
solutely trustworthy in His teaching on right and 
wrong? Some of God’s most earnest workers have 
recently been divided into two camps; and a great 
part of the controversy is concerned with the 
‘inerrancy’ of Christ’s teaching. It is thought 
by some that if He did not know everything (and, 
let me repeat, He said Himself that He did not), 
He may not have known fully and perfectly the 
moral principles of God. The difficulty arises 
from the failure to realize that knowledge is of two 
different kinds, which stand on entirely different 
planes. Readers of Mr. Lacey’s book, Conscience 
of Sin, will remember how he points out that 
Science is one kind of knowledge, Conscience is 
another kind, i.e. the recognition of a standard. 
Men’s consciences need to be trained and developed 
that they may recognize and accept a standard 
that is always rising. No man except Christ can 
know and grasp and recognize the perfect, absolute 
standard, which is the character of God. ‘No 
man knoweth the Father save the Son.’ That 
knowledge did not involve what we call omniscience; 
it involved perfect oneness with God. When Christ 
laid down moral principles, it was not His intellect 
that taught Him. It was His intellect that was 
concerned in such matters as eschatology, and His 
intellect was subject to necessary human limitations. 
But in matters of right and wrong His teaching 
was the expression of Himself, who dwelt in God, 
and God in Him, with a union that was hindered 
by no barriers or limitations caused by sin. The 


THE IMAGE OF GOD 37 


inerrancy of His moral teaching was the inerrancy 
of His character as the Image of God. And with 
that Christianity stands or falls. 

Now this helps to explain two things which would 
otherwise be difficult, two things which are stated, 
perhaps, in their most difficult form in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. The writer says that Christ, 
‘though He was a Son, learned obedience through 
the things that He suffered.’ We must not slur 
the words ‘learned obedience.’ If language means 
anything they imply that He knew more about 
obedience at the end of His life than He did earlier; 
they imply, in some sense, a moral growth in Jesus 
Christ. Moral growth, although He was never 
otherwise than perfect. It sounds like a paradox, 
almost a contradiction in terms. But the apparent 
difficulty disappears if we rightly apply what has 
been said about personal quality. Take an instance 
of it as an illustration. Our Lord was ‘meek and 
lowly in heart.’ How did He exhibit it? When He 
was a small Child He exhibited humility as a small 
child ought to exhibit it. We picture a quiet, 
unquestioning obedience, without a trace of crossness 
or sulkiness; a readiness to believe that older people 
knew better than He did; a complete absence of 
forwardness, or talking too much, or giving Himself 
airs, or being a nuisance. But when He grew older, 
He went to school at the village synagogue, as all 
Jewish boys did. And the temptations of a school- 
boy are greater than the temptations of a small 
child at home. To be really meek and lowly in 
heart at the school age was harder than it was a few 
years earlier. And so His schoolboy temptations, 


38 CONCERNING CHRIST 


His schoolboy sufferings, taught Him more of 
what the quality of humility involved. Then He 
became a young man; He reached the age that is 
full of temptations to do as He liked, and to go 
where He pleased, to resent opposition, and to 
think it manly not to accept advice, and manly also 
to do everything that other young men do, Humility 
had to encounter increasing difficulties. But He 
was always humble, and continued to learn more 
and more what obedience to God meant by the 
temptations and trials that He suffered. And 
finally, as a grown man, He was faced with opposi- 
tion, ridicule, scorn, hatred, which grew almost 
daily in intensity. What must humility in such 
conditions have meant to One who was*in the 
position to make the claims that He made? Com- 
pare it again with the humility of the tiny Child at 
His Mother’s knee. The quality is the same, and 
it was always perfect. But it was exhibited in 
greater and greater depth and intensity with every 
stage of growth and change of circumstances. We 
must understand clearly that perfection is com- 
patible with growth. A rosebud and a rose can 
both be perfect, but each has the perfection that 
belongs to its own stage of development. And so 
the words begin to stand out with a clearer meaning: 
“He learnt obedience through the things that He 
suffered.’ He was never, even in the passing 
shadow of a secret thought, disobedient. But His 
obedience necessarily became fuller, richer, more 
glorious, as He passed through deeper and ever 
deeper suffering. At any given moment He was 
a perfect exhibition of the character of God at the 


THE IMAGE OF GOD 39 


stage of spiritual capacity that belonged to that 
moment. That is the only thing that makes it clear 
that His temptations were real temptations. 

And here we can understand a little better the 
thought that was before us at the end of the fore- 
going chapter. We may go on boldly to ask, Was 
the capacity for Jove found in an infant equal to that 
of the Crucified? No! It is impossible. Listen 
again to the New Testament. ‘He grew in wisdom 
and stature and in favour with God and man;’ He 
grew in favour with God. No theory that we form 
about our Lord’s divinity must clash with that 
sentence. He grew in favour with God because He 
grew in love. At any given moment His love was 
perfect for a human being at that age, at that stage 
of growth. But it needed all the sorrows and 
temptations of life, all the agony of Gethsemane, 
and then all the agony of Calvary, before His love 
was fully grown. At every moment from the time 
when Mary wrapped Him in swaddling clothes till 
the time when Joseph of Arimathaea wrapped Him 
in fine linen He was the Beloved, the Son in whom 
the Father was well pleased, because He revealed 
the sinlessness and the love of God with the per- 
fection belonging to each moment. At each mom- 
ment it was utterly, dazzlingly perfect, and there- 
fore as Infant, Boy and Man He was the Image of God. 

And this has already given us a clue to the other 
difficult verse in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “He 
was in all points tempted like as we are.’ We feel 
inclined to ask, How can that be? How could He 
have, for instance, all the temptations of an I[rish- 
man in Dublin in the twentieth century? Again, the 


40 CONCERNING CHRIST 


temptations of a man differ in many respects from 
those of a woman. And there are thousands of 
millions of different circumstances which make 
temptations different, and constantly changing, for 
every human being on earth. How could He experi- 
ence them all? He could not of course. What the 
verse means is that since He exhibited all the divine 
qualities that every man, woman, and child ought to 
exhibit, He was tempted in respect of every one of 
those qualities. If our circumstances bring to us 
temptations to be untruthful, or impatient, or con- 
ceited, or unkind, or self-indulgent, His circumstances 
brought to Him temptations to be the same. The 
ways in which we yield to temptation are often very 
different from the ways in which He as a Jew of 
Palestine in those days would have yielded—if He 
had yielded. But in all points, in respect of all the 
qualities of His divine character, the temptations to 
fail in exhibiting the qualities were the same as those 
ofallmen. But He never failed. He was the Image 
of His Father, and therefore the climax of creation 
which man was intended to be. And in Him, 
strengthened with His strength, saved by His life 
and death, borne up before God by His intercession, 
inspired by His Spirit, we can go forward, and by 
daily prayer, daily penitence, daily struggles we 
can gradually be transformed into that same Image 
from glory unto glory. 


7. INSTINCTS. 


Our Lord’s temptations need some further study. 
Many people, even some of those who read their 
Bible, when they hear of His temptations think 


INSTINCTS 41 


almost exclusively of the three-fold temptation in 
the wilderness. Butif He was in all points tempted 
like as we are, it was a life-time of temptation. 
One of our human trials is the daily and hourly 
presence of temptation all our life long. S. Paul 
describes it in the words, ‘I see another law in my 
members, warring against the law of my mind.’ 
A modern psychologist would express it differently, 
but it is the same universal phenomenon that he has 
to describe. We are learning to think of human 
nature in terms of instinct. And the experts are 
still discussing the best ways of classifying the 
instincts; they differ as to which are primary 
and which are secondary, and even which are 
instincts and which are not. But all are agreed on 
the one obvious fact that there is an antagonism, a 
strain, a clash within the being of man. From the 
point of view of the moral life we can distinguish 
broadly between the instincts that make for the 
assertion and preservation and gratification of Self, 
and those that make for the yielding up, denying, 
giving out of Self to men and to God. That was the 
war that S. Paul felt within him. But what are 
we to say of Him who was greater than S. Paul? An 
adequate and satisfying analysis of His psychology 
has yet to be written,—and will never be written 
because the mystery of His Person places Him in so 
many respects outside the region of scientific analysis. 
We can analyse something satisfactorily only when 
we thoroughly comprehend all it components. But 
that does not prevent us from learning as much as 
we can about Him. We can study His temptations 
in the light of what we know of our own. 


42 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Temptation is occasioned by the clash of instincts 
which is natural and inherent in man. In the 
Epistle of S. James (i. 13-15) a unique attempt is 
made to deal with the question. God gave man the 
dignity of responsibility. ‘Let no one say, I am 
tempted of God.’ The wish to throw that respon- 
sibility upon Him is a wish to escape from all that is 
involved in the freedom of the will. Temptation 
arises from within, from man’s efithuma, his 
natural and instinctive desire, which is not in itself 
wrong. S. Luke, for instance, uses the word when 
he records our Lord’s statement, ‘With desire I 
have desired to eat this Passover with you.’ But 
when it is a desire for something which it would be 
wrong to gratify, when a clash of instincts occurs, 
it is felt as a peivasmos, a trial or temptation. And 
S. James says that a man can be affected by it as 
though he were being drawn and deluded by the 
evil solicitations of awoman. And, with acontinua- 
tion of the metaphor, when he yields to the solicita- 
tion the desire ‘conceives and gives birth to sin.’ 
Sin, then, according to this line of thought, is the 
wrong gratification of an instinctive desire. 

But we ace still left to decide how a wrong grati- 
fication is to be distinguished from a right one when 
the desire in either case is instinctive. Mere 
unrestrained self-assertion we feel sure is wrong; 
but mere unlimited self-denial, self-neglect, self- 
abasement is also wrong. And aconsideration of our 
Lord’s life seems to suggest that the right condition 
is one of perfect balance between the two, and that 
anything is wrong by which the balance is disturbed. 
It is wrong to gratify an instinct to excess, or under 


INSTINCTS 43 


particular circumstances, or in particular ways. 
Human nature, with the rest of the universe, is 
built on the lines of paradox, and the solution is not 
theoretical but practical, the preservation of stable 
equilibrium. It is impossible to lay down rules for 
each person as to the extent and the ways in which 
he ought to deny himself and assert himself respect- 
tively. But the more highly trained his conscience 
becomes, the closer that his spirit grows into union 
with God’s Spirit, the more perfectly he will, in fact, 
preserve the balance. The life of Jesus Ghrist was 
quite certainly not one of undiluted self-abnegation. 
He enjoyed social intercourse; He took real pleasure 
in the quiet home life of Martha and Mary; He took 
meals with His friends, with Pharisees, with pub- 
licans and sinners; He ‘came eating and drinking;’ 
He loved being with children; He entered with 
sympathy and zest into the details of the life of the 
men and women round Him; He delighted in the 
beauties of Nature. And I am perfectly certain 
that humour appealed to Him. Without humour it 
is difficult to imagine that anyone could draw and 
win and influence the man in the street; and several 
of His recorded utterance gain greatly in meaning if 
we picture Him saying them with a smile, or a 
twinkle in His eye. Further, He took steps on 
various occasions to preserve His life when it was 
in danger; and asserted Himself many times with an 
independence of convention and public opinion that 
was far removed from self-abasement. And yet 
with all this His life presents the ideal of self- 
sacrifice; He ‘pleased not Himself’; He came ‘not 
to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give 


4A CONCERNING CHRIST 


His life a ransom for many.’ The stress and strain 
between self-assertion and self-abnegation must 
always have been felt as a temptation, but every 
element in His nature retained its rightful place and 
proportion. We sometimes say that a man has 
the defects of his qualities, that is, that certain 
qualities in him are overdone, they are allowed too 
much prominence as compared with certain other 
qualities. He is so kind-hearted that he finds it 
difficult to be stern, or he is too stern in his moral 
rectitude to be kind-hearted; he is too honest 
to be always tactful, or he is too tactful to be always 
honest—and soon. But youcan study the character 
of Christ as often as you like, and you can never say 
that there was too much of this or too little of that. 
The balance was always perfect. The discord from 
the clash of instincts, which constitutes human trial, 
was always resolved in a divine harmony. 

A particular aspect of this which is always with 
us is the clash between the desire for freedom and 
obedience to authority—the authority of the church, 
for example, or of the Bible, both of which appear for 
some Christians to be non-existent; the authority of 
the State over its members, of parents and teachers 
over children, andsoon. (I follow here an illuminat- 
ing chapter in Dr. Crichton Miller’s The New 
Psychology and the Teacher.) The aim, of course, 
of every human being should be that the urge or 
drive of his nature should carry him along the 
straight line of his highest and best development. 
But at the outset of his life he is confronted by an 
apparent barrier. Authority stands in his way. 
And there appear to be only two courses open to him. 


INSTINCTS 45 


If his psychic disposition is such that the instinct 
which makes for the abnegation and abasement of 
self is predominant, he will yield himself readily to 
obedience. Obedience in children is a very good 
thing, and often seriously underrated in these days. 
And yet a strong-minded but unwise parent can get 
from such a child an obedience of a kind that will 
lead him away from his true development. It will 
not, as he grows up, become more voluntary, and be 
given because he is learning that what he has been 
told is good for him. He will obey because he has 
been psychically forced into the habit of obedience. 
And if this continues, as sometimes happens, till he is 
of adult age, the results are very bad. His thoughts 
and ideas are not really his own but his parents’. 
All his strongest desires incited by his other instincts 
are repressed, and it is quite likely that he may in 
time shew signs of neurosis of one kind or another. 
At any rate his life has been largely spoilt. 

We see the same in nations. Russia is suffering 
at the present time from acute neurosis, due to over- 
repression by authority in the past. And we see it 
in religion. The authority of the Roman Church is 
impressive, and extraordinarily attractive to some 
minds, because it produces obedience. But at what 
acost! Inthe Orthodox Church of the East it is the 
authority of the Creeds and General Councils, which 
has prevented all development for sixteen centuries. 
And in Islam, and a certain section of our own 
people, it is the authority of a Book, the Koran and 
the Bible respectively. A blind obedience, as we call 
it, is really a pathological condition in which human 
nature has been diverted from its true line of progress. 


46 CONCERNING CHRIST 


On the other hand the psychic disposition of the 
child may be such that the instinct of self-preserva- 
tion, self-assertion, has the dominant sway. And he 
will depart from the straight course of development 
in the opposite direction. Confronted with authority 
he will rebel, and grow up troublesome, defiant, 
unmanageable. We see it on a national scale in 
those to whom all ordered government is abhorrent, 
and who know no distinction between liberty and 
licence. And in religion it is represented in many 
heretics, cranks, and militant enemies of faith and 
morals. In a large number of cases they were 
driven into rebellion by unwise parents who made 
the mistake of over- pressure in religious matters and 
practices when they were under their authority 
as children. 

Here, then, are two directions in which men may 
move, both of them detrimental to true growth. 
It might seem a dilemma from which there is no 
escape. 

But let us imagine a child whose parents and 
teachers are so wise that they encourage both these 
opposing instincts in balanced proportion. That 
rare achievement is, in fact, the whole duty of every- 
one in authority over others. That is the aim that 
lies before the Anglican Communion in the training of 
the beliefs and lives of its members. And though it 
is very far from achieving it, it does, I think, 
approach a little nearer to it than any other Com- 
munion. There is no need, in any portion of the 
Catholic Church, moie urgent than a nearer approach 
to the ideal of a perfect balance between binding and 
loosing. How, then, will a child thus trained steer 


INSTINCTS 47 


between Scylla and Charybdis?—between blind 
obedience and rebellion? Authority will not be for 
him an impassable barrier which diverts him from 
the true line of progress. It will rather be an 
atmosphere through which he will pass safely. He 
will obey, but with increasing voluntariness, as he 
realizes what is good for him in the commands which 
he obeys. As he gets older, if his parents and teachers 
understand their work, he will not be imprisoned 
in authority, but will nevertheless live the rest of his 
life shaped and coloured and influenced by it; As he 
passes through the atmosphere and comes out, so 
to speak, at the other side of it, he will be able to 
look back and, if need be, criticize and find fault 
with parts of it, but also thankfully recognize all that 
it did for him. It has entered into his psychic 
disposition, and formed an element in his own strong, 
voluntary growth. He has passed right through it, 
to come out at the other side all the better for it, 
but free. And the authority of the Church and the 
Bible ought to be of the same kind. We are passing 
through the atmosphere during the whole of our 
earthly life, and we must be allowed freedom of 
conscience, freedom to criticize, freedom to obey 
voluntarily, while at the same time the Church and 
the Bible form a part of our very #syche, an element 
which we have made our own in the healthy, 
developing life of our soul. 

I have dwelt on these facts that we may see how 
perfect an example is to be found in our Lord Jesus 
Christ. He was confronted with the authority of 
His parents. And for thirty years He lived in that 
atmosphere rendering voluntary obedience. But 


48 CONCERNING CHRIST 


as early as the age of twelve He felt Himself at 
liberty to criticize and to act in independence. 
“Why is it that ye sought Me? Wist ye not that I 
must be about my Father’s business?’ And He 
must have retained the same liberty all the time that 
He was subject to them at Nazareth. And when 
the right moment came He felt Himself perfectly 
free to leave home and live His life as God called 
Him to live it. 

He was confronted also with the authority of the 
Jewish Church and of the Jewish Bible. And what 
was His attitude? He obeyed the Church volun- 
tarily. He was regular in His attendance at the 
annual feasts; He was regular in His attendance at 
the weekly synagogue; He bade the leper go and 
shew himself to the priests and offer the gift that 
Moses commanded. He strove to gain as much 
advantage as He could from the Church’s authority. 
Again, He was steeped in the Jewish Bible; He 
quoted it incessantly, based arguments upon it, and 
recognized in Himself the fulfilment of all its 
Messianic predictions. But who can describe the 
supremacy of His freedom? His freedom to deal with 
with it as He liked, and with the scribal tradition 
based upon it; His freedom to interpret it according 
to His own profound, independent grasp of the deep 
things that lay beneath it. It used to be said in 
in the sacred Bible, Thou shalt not do this or that; 
but I say unto you something much greater and 
deeper. The law of the Sabbath, the law of 
ceremonial pollution in general, and of clean and un- 
clean foods in particular, the law of vows and oaths, 
the law of divorce, the accepted superiority of the 


PARADOXES 49 


social, intellectual, and religious aristocracy of His 
day, the racial antagonism to the Samaritans, the 
uniqueness of the temple as the place where men 
ought to worship, the official custom of traffic in 
the sacred courts-—all were less than nothing to 
Him when they threatened to divert men from the 
line of true development. 

The problem of freedom and authority admits of 
no theoretical solution. But our Lord solved it in 
practice by retaining the one while He gained all 
that was to be gained from the other. 


8. PARADOXES. 


Further meditation on His balance of opposites 
will make us feel the more deeply the mystery of His 
being. It is often said that we live in an irreligious 
age, by which is meant that the accepted forms and 
habits of religion are interwoven much less closely 
with daily life than they used to be. Religion used 
to be more conventional, more a matter of duty, but 
less intelligent; and men to-day are more than ever 
interested in the problems of religion in their bearing 
upon life. Above all, whatever controversies wax 
and wane, men can never rid themselves of the 
problem of Jesus Christ, and from one generation to 
another they feel compelled to discuss Him. The 
tendency of many to-day is to try to escape from the 
idea that He is a Mystery; it is time, they think to 
free ourselves from the learned subtleties of dogma 
and get back to the simple character of Christ, who 
went about doing good, and whose life and teaching 
afford the basis of the social Gospel which the world 
needs. Itis true that a social Gospel which does not 


E 


50 CONCERNING CHRIST 


rest on Him is bound to fail; but who shall describe 
for us the ‘simple character’ of Christ? We have 
learnt something of it already, but let us turn to it 
again, and see what we find. We are dependent for 
our knowledge of it upon the impression which it pro- 
duced upon four writers. And the question calls for 
an answer, Is the picture which they drew of it 
a true one? Not, Is the report which they give of 
His deeds and words accurate inits details? Weare 
considering a portrayal of character, not a chronicle 
of events. They were His devoted followers, and it 
would hardly have been surprising if they had 
idealized their pictures. Now if a follower of a 
great religious leader, deliberately or unconsciously, 
idealized his master’s character, the effect would be 
that what appealed most to the writer would be 
seen running through the whole. The character 
described would be in the main loving, or strong, or 
humble, or clever and so on, according to the writer’s 
ideal. And if idealized it would at least be a 
harmonious whole, with contradictions toned down. 
A clear cut image would emerge which would compel 
admiration or the reverse according to the ideas and 
temperament of each reader. But can any one 
produce before his mind a clear cut image of the 
character of Christ? It is full of what we should call 
the sharpest contradictions. 

For instance, one evangelist ascribes to Him the 
words, ‘I am meek and lowly in heart.’ S. Paul 
confidently appealed to the Corinthians ‘by the 
meekness and gentleness of Christ.’ It was a 
characteristic which all who knew anything of 
Jesus would take asanaxiom. Itis well-known that 


PARADOXES SI 


while the Greeks and Romans despised humility, 
and thought it was fit only for cringing slaves, 
Christianity, on the basis of Christ’s character, 
exalted it to a virtue of the first rank. And yet, the 
Man who was meek and lowly is represented as 
Himself saying openly that He was so: ‘J am meek 
and lowly in heart.” Can we conceive of any other 
humble man saying those words? We hear Him 
say ‘Come unto Me’; ‘I will give you rest’; ‘take My 
yoke upon you, and learn of Me’; ‘Can ye_drink of 
the cup that J drink of?’ ‘Heaven and earth shall 
pass away, but My words shall not pass away’; 
“Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My 
words . . of him also shall the Son of man be 
ashamed.’ Over and over again He said things 
which in the case of any other man would be con- 
demned as megalomania. His character, as the 
Gospels picture it, found room for the two opposites, 
humility and superhuman claims; meekness and 
supreme self-assertion. We think of our centuries of 
literary experience; our development of the art of 
history; we think of the subtle portrayal of character 
in our best novelists. And we defy any biographer, 
any novelist to invent, or to give an idealized portrait 
of, a character in which utter humility and the 
majestic use of the word ‘I’ are both felt to be right 
and natural. 

Take another point connected with this. Through- 
out the Gospels there is not a shadow of a hint that 
our Lord thought there was any sin in Himself. He 
preaches repentance, He claims authority to for- 
give sins, He is as stern as man can be against the 
self-satisfied and insincere; He teaches His disciples 


52 CONCERNING CHRIST 


to pray ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our 
debtors’; He proclaims that He has come to seek 
and to save that which lost; He came not to call the 
righteous but sinners; He speaks of Herod as ‘that 
fox;’ He calls the Pharisees ‘ blind leaders of the blind,’ 
‘a brood of vipers,’ ‘whited sepulchres.’ And yet, 
on the other hand, an evangelist can report Him 
as saying, ‘which of you convinceth Me of sin?’ He 
reveals at every moment that He is human; He 
lives in dependence upon His Father; He prays to 
Him, He spends whole nights in praying to Him. 
But never one syllable to suggest that He was in 
need of forgiveness. It is outside the subject of 
this chapter to discuss the question of His sinless- 
ness; we are considering only the remarkable fact that 
in a four-fold portrait of a Man, which many declare 
has been idealized by the writers, He is pictured as 
being transparently sincere and humble, and yet 
without one vestige of penitence. In all the 
biographies of Christian saints that have ever been 
written penitence and self-abasement have played 
a large part. A saint who never felt Himself to be 
sinner would not be a saint, but an obnoxious 
hypocrite. And Christ pours outupon thescribes and 
Pharisees His hottest floods of anger for that very 
sin, that primary and most deadly sin of hypocrisy. 
And yet no one dreams, or has ever dreamt, of 
charging Him with hypocrisy. Sincerity shines in 
Him with the clearness of crystal. It is difficult to 
describe in words what we mean by sincerity, but we 
read the Gospels and see it and feel it. And we are 
faced with the mystery of a character in which 
absolute sincerity was perfectly combined with a 
total lack of penitence. 


ECCENTRICITY 53 


How can we go back to the Man Jesus, and con- 
tentedly base our social Gospel on His words and 
deeds, without facing the question on what authority 
He said and did these things? The authority lay 
not in what He said and did, but in what He was; 
and that is the central problem of the whole com- 
plex of Christian dogma, the problem which every 
creed in Christendom has been an imperfect attempt 
to solve, and which all the thinkers in the world will 
never fully understand while this life lasts. Go 
back to the character of Jesus with increasing 
wonder, as all do who make any attempt to study 
it; go back to it as the foundation on which to build 
a social Gospel, as the source of every inspiration for 
service and for holiness; go back to it that you 
imitate Him as Man, and worship Him as God. 


g. ECCENTRICITY. 


If we cannot understand Him after nineteen 
centuries of thought, how far must He have stood 
beyond the grasp of the men and women with whom 
He lived on earth. ‘He is beside Himself.’ That is 
what some of His relatives and friends thought of 
Him. And later on in Jerusalem we read that the 
Jews said very much the same: ‘He hath a devil and 
is mad; why listen ye to Him’? ‘Mad,’ of course 
was an exaggeration from those who hated and 
feared Him. But to most people of His day he must 
have appeared at least what we call eccentric. 
Look at the word for a moment, and see what it 
really means. Imagine someone who was entirely 
absorbed in some not very useful hobby. If he 
thought of little else, and remained wrapped up in it, 


54 CONCERNING CHRIST 


spending all his time and money on it, and shunning 
ordinary society, we should say that he was eccentric. 
The word means ‘away from the centre,’ that is to 
say, the life and thoughts of an eccentric person 
revolve round a different centre from that of the 
majority of people, who accordingly think of them- 
selves as ‘normal.’ In the machinery of an engine 
there is something which is called the eccentric, 
because the centre round which it revolves is 
differently constituted from the centres round which 
other parts revolve. And when the word is applied 
to human beings, with our instinctive feeling of the 
importance of being normal we think of eccentricity 
or abnormality as not far removed from madness. 

And that was exactly what was felt about our Lord. 
His centre was different from the centre of men and 
women round Him. His centre was, indeed, that 
which was intended for man since the Creation, 
when he was made in the Image of God, but while 
Christ the Image of the invisible God had clung 
stedfastly to that centre, every other human being 
had moved away from it. 

In Palestine in our Lord’s day the ordinary mass 
of the poorer population, ‘the people of the land,’ 
were for the most part entirely engrossed in the 
labour necessary for their daily bread. But of those 
who stood out with any prominence in the life of 
the nation we can distinguish three main groups. 
They had very diverse ideas and aims, and it might 
seem at first sight as if each of them would appear 
eccentric or abnormal or mad to the others. But 
the fact that they did not, shews that with all their 
religious and political differences, the real centre 


ECCENTRICITY 55 


of all alike was ultimately the same. The Zealots 
burned with a consuming passion to make Palestine 
independent of Rome; they set themselves to rebel 
at every opportunity against their conquerors, to 
make government impossible, and at last to throw 
off the hated yoke and to bask in the sunshine of 
an exclusive nationality. At the opposite pole 
were the Sadducees, the priestly party and their 
followers, who fawned upon their conquerors, and 
upon the Herods whom Rome allowed to-be their 
native governors. As a class they were greedy 
of wealth and petty authority, worldly and irreligious. 
If a Herod insisted on the Jews discarding circum- 
cision, and adopting Greek customs, Greek dress and 
games and habits of life, they were only too ready 
to fall in with it, because their compliance made 
the authorities smile upon them, and exalt them 
to high offices, and add to their wealth. And the 
reaction from this was the rigid puritanism of the 
Pharisees. They despaired of their nation as a whole, 
and were bent on saving their own souls by scrupul- 
ous obedience to the law, and to the scribal tradition 
which was being built up to safeguard the law. 
Some of them, at the same time, longed for the 
Messiah from heaven, who would not only sweep 
away Rome, but would sweep away all sinners, and 
admit the select circle of pious Pharisees, and them 
alone, to the delights of the coming Kingdom. 
Think of a heaven composed entirely of pious 
Pharisees (ancient or modern)! 

But although these classes in Palestine were so 
different, none of them, as has been said, thought 
the others eccentric or mad, because the centre 


56 CONCERNING CHRIST 


of one and all was Self,—Self in the form of national- 
ism, Self gratified by worldly advancement and 
wealth, and, the most dangerous and subtle of 
all, Self under the guise of piety. It was because 
this was the most dangerous and subtle that our 
Lord vehemently attacked the scribes and Pharisees, 
hypocrites, and did not trouble to attack the others 
at all. 

And to all alike, Jesus Christ appeared to be 
abnormal, mentally unhinged. ‘Beside Himself’ 
means exactly the same as ‘eccentric.’ Their 
centre was Self; His centre was determined by the 
giving out of Self to others, the subordination of 
Self to the interests of others, the assertion of 
Self perfectly balanced by the sacrifice of Self, the 
balance being kept by the unquenchable desire 
for the glory of His Father. His centre, in a word, 
was Love. He went about doing good. We are 
so accustomed to it, living in a society permeated 
for nineteen centuries with the Spirit of Christ, 
that we are not surprised when we meet people 
who go about doing good. But in that age it was 
unique, abnormal, eccentric. And though the 
world to-day admires it up to a certain point, 
beyond that point it is thought of in the same way. 
Every Christian who is true to his name, who 
keeps life centred round the things of God, must 
be ready to suffer the accusation. Christ and the 
world are eccentric to one another, because the 
world of men has moved away from the centre for 
which it was created. 

Now let us change our metaphor (though the 
change is not very great when we examine the 


ECCENTRICITY 87 


matter), and consider another word, more often 
used than eccentricity, and much more often 
misused, the word Repentance. English is a great 
language, but it has some serious limitations. The 
word ‘repentance’ is Latin in origin, and neither 
Hebrew nor Greek possesses anything like it. 
Latin thought during the middle ages throughout 
Europe was dominated by the legal conceptions 
of the Roman jurists; and this word is one of its 
products together with the closely allied words 
‘penitence,’ ‘penance,’ and ‘penalty.’ If a man 
who had sinned was sorry enough to be ready to 
undergo the requisite penalty, it was thought that 
he put the matter right with God and with men. 
In modern times the thought of paying a penalty 
mostly drops out of sight, and ‘repentance’ is 
used quite loosely as equivalent to ‘being sorry,’ 
which means very different things to different 
people. How can it be made clear to people that 
‘being sorry’ by itself will never do a man’s soul 
any good? That which wins forgiveness is being 
sorry with the sort of sorrow that makes him start 
to do better. The Greek word which is commonly 
translated ‘repentance’ contains the thought that 
we need; it means ‘the shifting of the mind to a new 
direction.’ I have committed a sin; if my re- 
pentance, my being sorry, is to be of the faintest use, 
it must be sorrow that makes me turn to a new 
path which leads away from the sin in question. 
I am afraid there are countless people who think 
that they have repented of a sin, when they haven’t 
really repented at all. They felt sorry, and sinned 
again; and they felt sorry again, and sinned again. 


58 CONCERNING CHRIST 


And the usual result is that they feel less and less 
sorry as time goes on. They have never really set 
to work to move—to shift they mind—in a new 
direction that will lead them away from their sin. 
Many people tied and bound with the chain of their 
sins are sorry for being tied and bound; but they 
don’t break loose. They generally think they 
can’t. But they can, if the strength of Christ and 
the power of the Holy Spirit have any meaning. 
Imagine a vessel on the ocean. If the man at the 
wheel put her on a wrong course, what possible 
use would it be for him merely to be sorry without 
putting her back again? The longer he went on 
being merely sorry the further she would stray 
from the right direction. For this shifting of the 
mind the nearest English word we have is ‘con- 
version.” But this has mostly been confined to 
the great crisis which some have experienced, 
a more or less sudden, radical transformation when 
a soul turns for the first time and surrenders itself 
wholly to God. But whenever a soul that has 
been surrendered for years, and is growing in 
strength and beauty, realizes that it has departed 
by a hairsbreadth out of touch with God, and is so 
sorry that it instantly prays to be forgiven and 
taken back again, so that it is shifted again into the 
true path, that is conversion, every time. 

Now this metaphor of shifting the mind to a new 
direction is not very different from that of shifting 
to a new centre. The more progress a man makes 
in the direction which leads to God, the further he 
travels from those whose minds have not been 
shifted from their natural, instinctive centre— 


REPENTANCE 59 


devotion to Self. And when he has travelled away 
from them beyond a certain point, they begin to 
realize that he has become eccentric. Our Lord, 
who never sinned, never had to shift His mind to a 
new direction; He was the only living being who 
needed no repentance. And His eccentricity moved 
men to scorn and hatred and opposition, until they 
had Him murdered. His life is a great appeal to 
those who would like to imitate Him if they could, 
but shrink from being thought abnormal, dread 
being looked down upon as eccentric. It is an 
appeal to them to risk everything and take the 
plunge, to cast their nervousness and pride behind 
their backs, to look to Him for strength and courage, 
and to forsake all and follow Him, to move to His 
centre in scorn of consequence. And His life is 
an appeal also to those who have begun to follow 
Him. He longs to draw them with the cords of 
love further and further from their old sins, and to 
draw them to such sorrow for their present sins 
that whenever they fail they will invariably and 
at once turn back to Him, and set their face ever 
afresh along the road that He trod. Keep Him, 
keep His Love, as your centre, and all your sins, 
all your old weak, unstable, frightened, earth- 
clinging Self will dwindle away in the distance as 
you move with Him nearer and nearer into union 
with God. 


Io. REPENTANCE. 


Since our Lord was the only human being who 
needed no repentance, if we want to study an 
instance of it we must look at someone else. At 


60 CONCERNING CHRIST 


the end of His first recorded sermon S. Peter cried, 
“Repent and be baptized... for the remission 
of sins.’ And in another sermon, ‘Repent there- 
fore, and turn to the wiping out of your sins.’ 
And John the Baptist said the same, ‘Repent for 
the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’; and our Lord 
told the disciples to go out and say the same; and 
He said the same Himself. One and all they went 
forth with this primary and important message. 
Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus, learnt 
what it meant; and his well known story will 
serve as an illustration. Think of his state of mind 
up to that moment—a pious, narrow, rigid puritan, 
of the straitest sect of the Pharisees. And that in 
spite of the fact that he had listened to the teaching 
of Gamaliel, who was famous as one of the most 
wide-minded and progressive Jews of his day. But 
although, with the assurance of youth, he probably 
thought that the Rabbi’s wide-minded progressive- 
ness was a great mistake, yet some of the things 
that he said very likely stuck in his mind. And 
if so, his narrow puritanism was already beginning to 
kick against some pricks. Then he heard that a 
little group of Jews had the effrontery to declare 
that a certain man—from Galilee of all places!— 
was the Messiah. And such a man! He had laid 
Himself out to break the Sabbath; He had held 
up to ridicule some of the scribal rules and casuistries; 
and He had Himself claimed to be the Messiah. 
Of course the thing had to be stopped. The 
authorities were perfectly right in getting the Roman 
procurator to execute Him as a common criminal. 
But that only made matters worse, because His 


REPENTANCE 61 


followers insisted that they had seen Him alive. 
And so Saul persecuted them, and found them 
immovable in their faith. In relating his experiences 
afterwards he said, according to the Authorized 
Version, ‘I compelled them to blaspheme.’ But the 
Greek really means ‘I tvied to compel them to 
blaspheme’; and he failed. But when he questioned 
them or heard them questioned at their trials, they 
were so obviously honest and convinced, so evidently 
filled with an impelling inspiration, and so fearless, 
that the momentary thought shot into his mind, 
‘Fancy if they were right after all!’ But he crushed 
the silly idea down into his unconscious mind; 
he kicked against the pricks, and shewed that he 
did so by persecuting these dreadful people the 
more fiercely. And his kicking and his persecuting 
were brought to a climax by the sensational death 
of one of his victims, named Stephen, a Hellenist 
with advanced heretical views. At his trial he 
cried out that he saw the Son of Man standing at 
the right hand of God; at his execution he said, 
“Lord Jesus receive my spirit’; and he asked this 
same Master to forgive his executioners, just before 
the last stone crushed the life out of him. Saul 
was feeling the pricks so badly that he lashed himself 
into a fury of zeal. The truth that he had repressed 
into his unconsciousness was driving him one way, 
and all his instincts and his past were driving him 
the other; and he was torn in two. But at last 
the pressure became too great; he reached the 
breaking point, and he saw Jesus. He fell prostrate 
and blind with the last unbearable tension. But 
the struggle and strain were over; Jesus was the 


62 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Messiah after all; His followers were right after 
all. 

It is quite clear what happened to him. It was 
a change of mind, a change of outlook and ideas 
and feelings, a shifting of his centre of gravity, a 
new and different view of everything. His centre 
had formerly been Self, the saving and rewarding 
of his own soul by Jewish orthodoxy and Jewish 
righteousness; it was now the Risen Christ. He 
was the same man as before, with the same instincts 
and temperament and powers; and yet a different 
man, because he was now moving on a different 
plane, living in a different atmosphere, aiming at 
different goal. ‘If any man be in Christ he is a new 
creature; old things have passed away, behold all 
things are become new.’ S. Paul exhausts his 
wealth of language in describing the transformation 
of a non-Christian into a Christian. The reader 
would find it a fruitful subject for Bible study 
and meditation. Read through S. Paul’s epistles 
slowly in your daily readings, making lists under 
different headings of the various aspects in which 
he pictures the great change. The non-Christian 
and the Christian become eccentric to one 
another. 

But when Saul had gained this new outlook on 
everything, so that the entire universe had become 
a different place to live in, it was natural that he 
should wish others to share his experience, as he 
had previously wished to compel others to take 
his Jewish point of view. We must remember, 
however, that in his epistles he was writing to those 
who had begun to share his experience. The change 


REPENTANCE 63 


of mind, the metanoia, which is translated ‘repen- 
tance,’ was that which led a man in those days 
to come out of Judaism or paganism into Chris- 
tianity. In his epistles, therefore, the word is not 
very frequent, though in his missionary preaching 
he no doubt used it often enough. But that does 
not mean that in the present day it is of use only 
in appeals to Jews and pagans. He wrote at a 
time when spiritual enthusiasm was at its height. 
It is true his converts were very young in faith 
and practice; they made bad mistakes, and had to 
be corrected. But there had not yet crept upon the 
Church that deadening paralysis which prevails 
to-day. Christians were Christians, and not sham 
ones. To-day everyone in the so-called Christian 
countries is assumed to be Christian unless he 
definitely claims to be something else. And conduct 
on the whole is controlled and kept respectable 
by generations of Christian influence in Europe. 
But how many need a change of outlook! They 
are not led by the Spirit of God; they have no love 
_ for Christ, and exceedingly little love for Christians. 
They are immersed in the things of this life, and 
they have no sort of wish to be immersed in anything 
else. Religious matters seem to them so entirely 
uninteresting that they simply bore them when 
they are brought in contact with them; but for the 
most part they successfully avoid being bored by 
having as little to do with them as possible. It 
was not that sort of thing that S. Paul had to 
contend with. He was not up against the padded 
wall of well-behaved worldliness. To-day, a change 
of outlook, a change of values, a change of centre, 


64 CONCERNING CHRIST 


is the first deep need of ninety-nine men and women 
out of a hundred. 

The remaining one per cent. are of two kinds— 
those who have, gradually or suddenly, experienced 
the great change, who have ‘repented and turned,’ 
to use S. Peter’s phrase, and those (a tiny fraction 
per cent.) who do not need it. I think we must 
recognize that there are men and women whose 
heredity and surroundings have been such that 
their souls are naturally Christian. When our 
Lord spoke of the ninety and nine just persons 
who need no change of outlook, while there was 
irony in His words it did not, I think, extend to 
every one of the ninety and nine. I do not, of 
course, mean for a moment that such souls that are 
‘naturally Christian’ have no sins to be sorry for. 
The more directly and earnestly they have set 
themselves to keep Christ as their centre, the more 
sorry they become for every sin and mistake and 
failing that makes them swerve from their true 
orbit. But there are men and women for whom, 
ever since they were old enough to think seriously 
at all, Christ has always been the most prominent 
figure in the foreground of their life and thoughts 
and ideals. To know intimately such men and 
women is a privilege enjoyed by few. 

But one question remains. What can we do to 
help people to this change of outlook, this shifting 
of the centre of gravity from earth to heaven, from 
Self to Christ? When we ask what it was that 
helped Saul of Tarsus, we find that it was mainly 
what he had seen of the lives and characters of 
Christians. The words ‘I am Jesus whom thou 


Pree PR INGRE YS SHIRET 65 


persecutest,’ identified them with their Master 
whose Spirit lived in them. And their characters 
were such that Saul was enabled to form a concep- 
tion of the Christ far more wonderful and beautiful 
and loving than any Jewish writings had ever 
suggested of the Messiah. If you are going to 
change people it will not be by a display of piety. 
Saul of Tarsus can never have had the opportunity 
of seeing the Christians engaged in the act of wor- 
shipping, unless he did so on occasions when he 
raided their service and arrested their leaders. 
Displays of piety mostly irritate those to whom 
you are eccentric. You will change them mainly 
by the same two things that influenced him: first 
by being obviously and unmistakeably good men 
and women, sincere, true, kind, self-disciplined; 
and secondly, whenever the need arises, by standing 
up quite fearlessly for the divine truths which form 
the mainstay of your life, because you are attached 
with cords stronger than steel to Jesus Christ your 
Hero. It is by what you are that those hearts 
which are still kicking against the pricks, whom 
Christ is still calling to look at things from His 
point of view, may be driven to the breaking-point, 
and learn to say with S. Paul, ‘I live, yet not I, but 
Christ liveth in me.’ 


Ir. THE PRINCELY SPIRIT. 


We have thought of our Lord’s character with 
the help of a metaphor suggested by the word 
‘eccentric,’ and of the great change which men 
need—a moving from the earthly centre to the 
heavenly. Let us now drop the metaphor, and 


F 


66 CONCERNING CHRIST 


think what it was that gave Him His wonderful 
power of appeal to the men and women among 
whom He worked. In a Psalm of penitence in 
which Christians for nineteen centuries, and Jews 
for yet more centuries, have poured out their soul 
in sorrow for sin, the writer says, “Uphold me with 
a free spirit.’ It really means ‘a princely spirit,’ 
the spirit of a prince, or of a free man, as opposed 
to the spirit of a slave. That for which he prayed 
is seen in its glorious perfection in our Lord Jesus 
Christ. The Gospels are so familiar to us that we 
do not always realize how thrillingly new and 
wonderful His words and actions must have been 
to the people of His day, who were slaves to law, 
to tradition, to custom, with a narrow and dried-up 
conservatism that seemed impervious. In the early 
months of His ministry almost everything that 
He said and did was a magnificent surprise. Time 
after time the evangelists reveal to us the effects: 
“The multitudes heard Him gladly’; ‘they were 
filled with astonishment’; ‘they glorified God who 
had given such power unto men’; ‘we have seen 
strange things to-day’; ‘it was never so seen in 
Israel’; “what manner of man is this?’; ‘they 
wondered at the words of grace that proceeded out 
of His mouth.’ It was because the princely spirit 
had brought a breath of the air of freedom to a 
nation of slaves. 

Look at some of the events strung together in 
only two chapters of S. Luke’s Gospel, chapters 
v. and vi. A leper met Him, one whom a long, 
cruel tradition had made an outcast, the degraded 
offscouring of humanity, who was compelled to live 


Wii PRINCELY SPIRIT 67 


outside the town, and cover his mouth, and cry 
“Unclean, unclean!’ to warn every passer-by not 
to pollute himself by coming too close. But one 
day the Man with the princely spirit came by. 
‘And Jesus put forth His hand and touched him’— 
touched him!—defiled Himself so that according 
to Jewish law He was as unclean for the time being 
as the leper Himself, to say nothing of the risk of 
catching the disease. What a rush of wonder the 
sufferer must have felt at being touched, not to 
speak of healed. Next we read of the paralysed 
man, let down through the roof into the crowded 
room where the Lord was preaching. To heal him 
was wonderful, but much more wonderful was the 
unheard-of claim that a man could forgive sins. 
The whole crowd were dumbfounded, stirred to 
their very depths by the way in which the princely 
Spirit rose in calm assurance over all the petty ideas 
that the nation of slaves had ever had about man 
and his spiritual authority. And then came another 
shock. The collectors of the public taxes, ‘pub- 
licans,’ as our Authorized Version calls them, were 
low class Jews who were unpatriotic enough to do 
what was felt to be the dirty work of their Roman 
conquerors; and they were hated and despised 
accordingly. But we read that our Lord made one 
of them a member of His closest band of followers, 
and then actually sat down to a meal with a whole 
party of them. ‘Publicans and sinners’ were 
scarcely a shade better than lepers. But the 
princely spirit saw in them only souls to be saved. 
Just after that, the disciples, who had begun to 
come under the influence of that spirit, broke 


68 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Jewish rules by rubbing some grains of corn in 
their hands on the Sabbath. But the Lord defended 
their action. Human needs must be allowed in 
charity to over-ride petty human rules. It was 
because men were slaves to these rules that they 
could not see how petty they were. And the same 
principle was made good once more when He healed 
the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath, in 
the synagogue, before the whole august array of 
scrupulous, conservative, puritanical scribes and 
Pharisees. And the rest of the chapter, after the 
call of the Twelve, is S. Luke’s version of the Sermon 
on the Mount, in every word of which ‘He spake 
with authority and not as the scribes,’ the authority 
of the princely spirit. 

It was the spirit that refused to tithe mint and 
anise and cummin instead of putting the weightier 
matters first; the power to strike out new lines of 
thought, new ideas, new methods, by an inspiration 
that came from above; the spirit that afterwards 
flooded the disciples at Pentecost and enabled 
them to say, ‘Whether it be right in the sight of God 
to hearken unto you rather than unto God judge 
ye, “We must obey God rather than men’; the 
refusal to be enslaved by what is old and con- 
ventional simply because it is old and conventional; 
—it was this princely spirit, this divine exhilaration, 
that electrified Galilee and drew men in crowds. 
We can hear the ring of joy in S. Paul’s words, 
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.’ 

That is what we need in our life and work, 
constant breaths of that wide, free air that will help 
us to put the great, deep things of God first, put 


iter Ee RINGER ASPIRE 69 


the saving of souls first, put charity and deliverance 
and healing first, and to put last everything little 
and narrow and petty and selfish and small. And 
our needs are also the needs of all workers for God 
at home and abroad. Constant change is a 
necessary part of human progress in religious and 
social work as in everything else. And yet it 
is often a temptation to resent it. A worker is apt 
to feel that the methods that he is accustomed to, 
methods that have been good enough for him, 
ought to be good enough for the younger workers 
that join him. Pride prevents him from seeing 
that ideas which were very likely the best that had 
been reached, say, ten or fifteen years ago, are not 
necessarily the best now. It needs a rich endow- 
ment of the princely spirit to make him rise above 
this resentment, and be humble enough to learn 
readily and eagerly new things from younger 
workers, realizing that, as our Lord says in this 
same fifth chapter of S. Luke, new wine cannot be 
kept in old skins. Some of our old fixed ideas and 
habits and methods and peculiarities and crochets 
may have become, if we only knew it, like the dead 
bones in Ezekiel’s vision, very many and very dry. 
But if we pray with real longing ‘Renew a right 
spirit within me,’ “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from 
me,’ “Uphold me with a princely spirit, —if we pray 
‘Come from the four winds O Breath, and breathe 
upon these slain that they may live,’ every faculty 
We possess can spring into new life to fight and work 
for God. And many other chains we may have 
which spoil our work—our old selfishness, and 
laziness, and self-pleasing, and _ self-centredness, 


70 CONCERNING CHRIST 


our old desire to be thought well of, our old critical, 
grumbling spirit, in short, our old sins. But where 
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 

That is our need, and the need of all workers. 
And then see the result. The Psalmist says, 
‘Uphold me with a princely spirit; then shall I 
teach Thy ways unto the wicked, and sinners shall 
be converted unto Thee.’ The world takes a very 
long time to be converted. That is partly its own 
fault no doubt; man possesses freedom of will, and 
can refuse to listen, refuse to be convinced and 
repent. Many refused even when our Lord was 
working among them. But very largely—iar more 
largely than we can calculate—it is due to the 
spiritual incapacity of the workers. Many workers, 
clergy included, have not yet reached a true repen- 
tance, have not yet been lifted by the divine Spirit 
out of their slavery to sin and self. If there is any- 
one whom we might have drawn nearer to God, but 
failed to do so because we were not near enough 
to Him ourselves, then we must echo the Psalmist’s 
cry, ‘Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God,’ 
deliver me from the guilt which I have incurred by 
not being capable of lifting up a dying soul into 
new life. 

Now let us look at our Lord again, and think 
how His work was done. When He touched the 
leper, it was not a magic, or a medicine in the 
physical sense. His touch was, so to speak, a 
sacrament by which a spiritual result was obtained. 
God’s stored up energy was available for the sufferer 
to draw upon, it was ready waiting, had been ready 
waiting since the first moment of the disease; and 


REE PRINCELY SPIRIT 71 


the princely spirit made it spring into activity, 
because it made the man co-operate with God. 
That is faith,—not the blind assent to what our 
intellect declares to be impossible, but an acceptance 
of God’s power in such a way as to come out to 
meet it and grasp it. And all the outward para- 
phernalia of our work, all the parish machinery 
by which we try to get hold of people, the clubs and 
societies and all the rest of it, are like the outward, 
physical touch, utterly useless unless the divine 
Spirit is in us which can call forth faith in the sinners 
whom we try to reach. 

The leper was one type of a sinner, the paralytic 
was another. He represents the people who are 
morally paralysed, too slack, too lazy, too weak, 
too much enervated by long self-indulgence or 
want of self-discipline to do anything for their own 
good. And what did our Lord do? He first 
assured him of the forgiveness of his sins, and 
then simply told him to get up; told him to do the 
one thing that he had probably not attempted for 
years, to get up, and carry his own mattress, and 
walk home! And the case of the man with the 
withered hand was exactly similar; our Lord told 
him to stretch it out. How was the healing done? 
There was no magic. But the princely spirit was 
such that it could gain an entrance into the depths 
of the man’s being and call into play the power that 
was within his reach all the time, though he thought 
he had lost it. If you can be in close touch with 
God, so close that you can convince a sinner of the 
divine forgiveness, and the divine strength that is 
in him, all his long-lost spiritual power will spring 


72 CONCERNING CHRIST 


into new life. But it is clear that nothing but the 
princely spirit can doit. It is as easy to say ‘Thy 
sins are forgiven thee’ as to say “Arise and walk.’ 
It was the divine authority exercised by the Son of 
Man, because He was in perfect union with His 
Father, that did the deed. And if any religious 
worker is in close touch with God, he can go and do 
likewise. 


12. PRINCIPLES. 


We have seen the princely spirit in action, trans- 
forming slaves into free men. Now suppose we 
had learnt only so much about our Lord’s life and 
no more, suppose we had never read a word of His 
sermons or discourses or conversations, so that we 
had to guess for ourselves what the moral teaching 
would be like of One whose spiritual power thus 
shewed itself in outward deed, we should say that a 
nation that was enslaved to rules could not be lifted 
up to freedom by yet more rules; and therefore 
that our Lord cannot have been a mere Rabbi, 
laying down fixed regulations of conduct. He must 
have declared the broadest and deepest principles 
of God, which free men could translate into practical 
daily details for themselves. Any details that He 
mentioned would be only illustrations of some of the 
ways in which the principles could be kept. Let us 
look at His moral teaching as recorded in the 
Gospels, and see how entirely it answers to our 
expectations. 

Someone said to me not long ago, ‘It is impossible 
to be Christian nowadays.’ It sounded almost as 
if the speaker meant that at one time it used to be 


PRINCIPLES 73 


comparatively easy to be Christian, but had recently 
become difficult. Christianity has always been 
difficult, and always will be, in the sense of needing 
hard effort. So is music, and scholarship, and 
football, and everything else that is worth doing. 
But the particular difficulty referred to in our 
conversation was that people are so often rude or 
troublesome or exacting or dishonest, or something, 
that it is impossible to follow the teaching of the 
Sermon on the Mount by ‘turning the other cheek.’ 
There is a widespread feeling that our Christianity 
is not really the religion of Christ, because no one 
obeys all the commands in that sermon, and that 
it is impossible to do so. 

And while on the one side there is this complaint 
that the ideal of conduct held up by Christ is too 
hard for this work-a-day world, on the other side 
we are assailed by a different one. Ethics has 
become a department of modern scientific thought. 
It is studied by many who openly claim to be 
non-Christian. And some ethical philosophers hold 
that by claiming Christ to have been morally 
perfect we bar the road to true ethical advance. 
If He was perfect, His character was one which 
can be imitated but never surpassed. But the 
nature of man is such that he must ever push 
forward along the line of development. And for 
this purpose the goal must be a far-off, unknown 
perfection towards which mankind must strive. 
A solitary instance of perfection in the first century, 
they say, is opposed to the general truth which 
every instructed person to-day takes for granted, 
that the world-process is a process of becoming. 


74 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Here are two sides to a serious problem: the 
moral ideal of Christ is something too high to be 
aimed at, and the moral perfection of Christ is 
something too high to be postulated! 

Look first at a sentence in the Sermon on the 
Mount: “Give to him that asketh of thee, and from 
him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away.’ 
The modern man objects that if that command were 
followed as it stands, it would mean indiscriminate 
charity and unlimited loans; and that would result 
in social chaos and ruin. An enormous proportion 
of the human race would decline to do a stroke of 
work so long as they could keep themselves success- 
fully by begging and borrowing. As S. Jerome 
pointed out fifteen centuries ago, the poor cannot 
obey the command; and if the rich obeyed it, they 
would soon be unable to do so because they would 
have nothing left to give or lend. The economics 
of this complex world make a complete and literal 
observance of the command simply unthinkable. 

Again, there are people who want us to resist no 
injuries, and never under any circumstances to use 
force; to do away, for instance, with all policemen, 
and to preserve and improve the well being of our 
cities by education and kindness. Most of us feel 
that that also would reduce social life to chaos and 
ruin. And even the people who deprecate all force 
never go on to give or lend to everyone that asks 
them. 

Look at another instance: ‘Take no thought (i.e. 
be not anxious) for the morrow, saying, What shall 
we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal 
shall we be clothed?’ What would happen to 


PRINCIPLES 76 


human society if everyone obeyed that command 
to the letter? We should all throw ourselves on 
the indiscriminate charity of those who happened 
to possess food, drink, and clothing, and these 
commodities would come to an end in an incredibly 
short space of time. It is true that our Lord’s 
word means ‘be not anxious’; but temperaments 
are so different that it is impossible to draw a sharp 
line between anxiety and prudent forethought. 

One more instance will be useful, not, this time, 
from the Sermon on the Mount. Our Lord was 
unmarried, and He quite distinctly commended 
those who left wife and children and followed Him, 
and those who kept themselves unmarried for the 
Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. What would happen 
if all Christians remained celibate? There would 
soon be no Christians in the world at all; Chris- 
tianity would die, and the soul of man would die 
with it. The sanctity of marriage, which Christ 
Himself declared to be a primaeval ordinance of 
God, is one of the foundation stones of human life. 

All this, of course, is very obvious, and has often 
been said. We cannot, and we ought not to, obey 
to the letter the Sermon on the Mount, and some 
other details in our Lord’s teaching. His moral 
injunctions are not fixed regulations literally binding 
upon men to the end of time. But then some 
people ask, Are you not whittling down the Christian 
ideal in order to make it possible by making it 
easier? That is the real question that needs an 
answer. 

I would ask the reader at this point to look again 
at page 36 and read what was said there about 


76 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Christ’s moral teaching and His moral perfection. 
Perfection is a matter of guality, not a programme 
of conduct. Let us say, for the sake of argument, 
that Beethoven’s music is perfect, and that Raphael’s 
painting is perfect. How are you going to compare 
them? They are not two perfections. Perfection 
is a quality, expressed in these two entirely different 
ways. Again, as has been said, a rosebud is perfect, 
and the full-grown rose is perfect; but the expression 
of perfection varies with the development of the 
flower; it does not remain the same for two days 
together. Our Lord as a little Boy was perfect, and 
at the last moment of His life, as He hung upon the 
Cross, He was perfect. But the expression of His 
perfection varied with every moment that He grew 
in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and 
man, and learnt obedience from the things that He 
suffered. And, finally, He said Himself, ‘Be ye 
perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is 
perfect.’ But the divine, infinite, eternal exhibition 
of all perfection is not the same as our human, finite, 
temporal exhibitions of it. 

And so we begin to see our way to an answer to 
the philosophical difficulty. If Jesus Christ had 
been born somewhere in Western Europe, say in the 
year 1900, instead of in Palestine nineteen centuries 
earlier, He would now be living on earth a perfect 
human life. Does anyone pretend to think that 
that perfection would express itself in exactly the 
same actions and habits and ways that it did in the 
life of a Palestinian Jew in the reign of Tiberius? 
It is only mistaken ideas of Christianity that give 
a handle to the objectors. We do not want to block 


PRINCIPLES ay 


the road of human ethical progress. When we say 
that we must aim at Christ’s character, we mean 
that we must aim at the divine quality of perfection 
which His character continuously and variously 
expressed as He grew to manhood, not at the 
particular form and mode of its expression that His 
time and place and circumstances, during the 
few months of His ministry, demanded from Him. 
The Christian ethic requires growth; it demands 
evolution; Christianity calls upon the race, and the 
races, in each successive age and period to strive 
to get nearer to a complete expression of perfection 
for that age and period. 

Now if this is the right way to regard the perfection 
of Jesus Christ, it must be the right way to regard 
the perfection which He wished to see in those who 
heard Him deliver the Sermon on the Mount. 
Think of the situation. There was the decadent 
Jewish nation, and the great Roman nation rapidly 
approaching its decadence, with its iron hand upon 
Palestine, and a medley of other nationalities 
constantly moving between East and West. And 
in this welter of politics, philosophies, ideals, and 
creeds, our Lord picked out a few simple country 
folk, who could separate themselves from the 
economics and the cosmopolitan life of their day 
without doing the slightest harm to themselves or 
anyone else. He called them to follow Him in 
poverty and detachment from the world, and gave 
them rules of conduct which were to mark them out 
as sharply as possible from the society in which 
they lived, that they might preach the near advent 
of the Kingdom of God. The rules of conduct were 


78 CONCERNING CHRIST 


particular expressions of great principles. The 
principles were eternal, but the specific rules were 
instances suited to the time and the place and the 
hearers. Some of them are suitable to some 
Christians to-day; the saintliness of many members 
of religious communities who devote themselves 
to poverty, obedience, and celibacy, is evidence of it. 
But to make the rules universally binding would 
be to do precisely what our Lord Himself deprecated. 
It would mean exalting the letter of His commands 
at the expense of their spirit. ‘The letter killeth,’ 
as S. Paul says, ‘but the spirit giveth life.’ It would 
mean putting a yoke of slavery on those who pray 
for the princely spirit of freedom. For those few 
followers at that time and in that country, celibacy, 
the non-resistance of injuries, indiscriminate charity, 
and complete detachment of mind from the worry 
of ensuring to-morrow’s food and clothing, were 
methods planned with a definite and immediate 
purpose, and not planned for all human society in 
the twentieth century. 

But so far from whittling down the Christian ideal, 
this way of looking at it makes it harder than ever 
to reach. It is exceedingly difficult to make an 
exact and accurate copy of a great masterpiece; 
but it is much more difficult so to be imbued with the 
spirit of the Master as to produce an original master- 
piece of one’s own. But that is what we are called 
upon to do. It is exceedingly difficult to imitate 
the manner of life of our Lord and His apostles, 
and to keep the rules that He made for them; but 
it is much more difficult to be so filled with His 
Spirit that we can make rules for ourselves, and 


PRINCIPLES 79 


work out His eternal principles in such a way as to 
express His perfection in the manner that our modern 
life demands. Instead of giving charity to every 
beggar that asks for it, we are to use our money with 
a full and vivid recognition that it is not our own; 
that every penny we have is entrusted to us to use 
in love to God and men. That is far harder than 
mere charity, indiscriminate, sentimental, harmful, 
and unwise. Instead of maintaining that we must 
under no circumstances resist evil, we are to be so 
filled with love that we shall resist at the right time 
for the sake of others and the glory of God. And 
on the other hand we are to be so shining with 
humility that we shall at the right time accept 
injuries in long-suffering and silence. That is far 
harder, and far more in accordance with Christ’s 
wishes than to obey rigidly and mechanically the 
bare command to turn the other cheek. And we 
shall by the same Spirit know whether God wants 
from us celibacy for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake, 
or the sacred and wonderful responsibility of 
Christian marriage and Christian parenthood. In 
every detail of life we are treated as grown men, 
not as children. We are given the hard task, not 
of mere obedience to this or that rule of conduct, 
but, of proving, testing, discovering, deciding for 
ourselves with the help of the divine Spirit what is 
acceptable unto the Lord. Let no one think” that 
we are making Christ’s law of none effect; nay, we 
establish the law. 


80 CONCERNING CHRIST 


13. THE REAL MAN. 


The life and character of Jesus Christ are absorb- 
ing, but we must pass on to think of His death. 
Before doing so, however, a short meditation may 
be useful for the purpose of summing up our thoughts 
about Him who is our life, and our life’s ideal. In 
I John iv. 17 we read ‘as He is so are we in this 
world.’ Could anything exceed the boldness with 
which the writer pictures our kinship with Christ? 
He speaks as if we had become already what God 
wants us to be. But that boldness is seen also in 
many other parts of the New Testament. S. Paul 
especially revels in the thought. All Christians 
are saints; they are perfect; they are in Christ, 
sharing His life like limbs in a body; they are children 
of God, justified, glorified, dead to sin, sitting with 
Christ in heavenly places. Though we have not 
yet reached the ideal, S. Paul is sure that we have 
it in us to reach it; as far as Christ’s work is con- 
cerned the thing is done; we have been translated out 
of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the 
Son of God’s love. And so we are exhorted to walk 
worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called; 
to walk worthily as becometh saints; to walk as 
children of light. 

These are some of the many ways of describing 
what we are intended to become. But for our 
present purpose I want to follow one particular line 
of thought. A portrait of a man may be an ex- 
tremely good likeness, but it is not, of course, a real 
man. You can see something still more like life 
in the pictures of men and women at a cinema; 


THE REAL MAN 81 


more realistic, but not real men and women. Or, 
once more, you might see a waxwork figure of a 
man, with machinery so ingenious that it could 
walk about and even talk. Wonderfully realistic, 
but not real. It could do nothing voluntarily; it 
could feel nothing, know nothing; it would-not enter 
into human relations with human beings; men 
would not have to adapt themselves to it in the way 
that they would to real manhood. But the illustra- 
tion must be pursued further. Though the wax- 
work figure is not a real man, it is a real waxwork 
figure. Why do we call it real? If I dreamt of a 
waxwork figure, I should think it was real at the 
time, and in my dream I should treat it, and adapt 
myself to it, as a real thing. But no one else 
would. Mankind would not call it real unless it 
appealed not only to me but to mankind in such a 
way that all would treat it as answering from every 
point of view to their idea of a waxwork figure. 
We call a thing real, then, if it answers in every 
respect to our idea of it. 

But when we come to human life, we have to 
consider not only our ideas, but our ideals. If we 
watched a child playing tennis for the first time, we 
might call it tennis if we wanted to speak kindly. 
But if we watched a final championship match at 
Wimbledon we could say, That is real tennis; that 
is the real thing. We should not be speaking, 
perhaps, with philosophical exactness, but the words 
would express an important truth. To our minds 
there are degrees of reality according to the approach 
that is made to our perfect ideal. If you met aman 

who would not go to the slightest trouble or danger 


G 


82 CONCERNING CHRIST 


or inconvenience to save someone’s life, or a man 
rolling in money who would not give a penny to save 
his mother from the workhouse, you would say, 
‘That’s not my idea of aman’; and you might equally 
well say, ‘That’s not a real man.’ The true nature 
of a thing is that which it is capable of becoming. 
Real is Perfect. Now we see through a glass 
darkly; now we see what is only partially real. But 
when that which is perfect is come, then we reach 
Reality. 

All these illustrations will help to lead up to the 
thought that we are trying to study. If we believe 
in a divine Mind, we must believe that God’s idea, 
or ideal, of a man is something immeasurably 
greater than our minds could conceive. To His 
Mind a man would be perfectly and completely real 
only if he answered in every respect to the perfect 
divine ideal. And it follows that not one of us is a 
perfectly reaalmanorwoman. Weare only partially, 
relatively real. Most of us are only beginners like 
the child learning to play tennis. We have before us 
a long process of practice and improvement. But 
then we ask, Process towards what? What is God’s 
ideal of a man? His ideal can be nothing short of 
perfect goodness. But perfect goodness is what 
God Himselfis. So His ideal is that man’s character 
should be a flawlessly perfect reproduction of His. 
God, in His essential character, is not Power or 
Law, or Knowledge, or Eternity or any other of the 
supreme things that we attribute to Him. The 
essence of God is Goodness, with Love as its primary 
expression. But since our minds are not His Mind, 
we could not, from the nature of the case, conceive 


THE REAL MAN 83 


of perfect goodness. And so He shewed it to us. 
That is what Christianity stands for: that is the 
message that it gives to the world. The message is 
not that everyone ought to try to be very good; 
many prophets and moralists in all ages have 
preached that. The Christian message is distinc- 
tively Christian only where it is, in the strictest sense, 
unique. It is that God, of His own purpose, of His 
own love, revealed to us perfect goodness. No 
moral teacher since the world began has been 
capable of shewing it to us, because from the nature 
of the case, as has been said, no man could possibly 
find it out for himself. But we learn what it is by 
looking at Jesus Christ. When we do that, we do 
not find Omnipresence, Omnipotence, Omniscience 
and so on; but we find that which He came to reveal 
and introduce into the world, perfect Goodness, the 
very essential Nature of God Himself. 

The thing was so vast that the disciples could not 
realize it all in a few months; they could only stand 
on the brink of the Infinite, and look dimly into the 
fathomless depths of the character of God. A child 
cannot of himself imagine an oratorio such as Bach 
wrote; but even when he hears it, how much does 
he understand? Hemust become a trained musician, 
he must make some approach to the mind of Bach if 
he is to gain a growing understanding of him. The 
disciples learnt much more by Christ’s Death and 
Resurrection, and the New Testament is a record 
of their growing understanding; but the Church has 
been learning more ever since. As S. Paul says, we 
must ‘grow up unto Him in all things,’ and it takes 
the whole world’s lifetime to do that. We are all as 


84 CONCERNING CHRIST 


children beginning to study the divine music; and 
whatever our advance has been in the spiritual life, 
we do not yet fully understand the real thing, the 
perfect goodness of the Real Man. | 


Part II 


I. TRIUMPH. 


In Part I. we began by collecting a few of the 
thoughts suggested by the stories of our Lord’s 
infancy and childhood before entering upon the 
deeper doctrinal problems of His Character and 
Person. In the same way we can now distil some 
meaning from the stories of incidents or persons 
connected with the Passion, before passing on to 
dwell upon the profound truths involved in it. 

We begin at Palm Sunday, with the entry into 
Jerusalem. What a triumph it was! The popular 
Hero come to His own at last. When He emerged 
from the seclusion of Nazareth and began His 
preaching, everyone wondered at the words of grace 
which proceeded out of His mouth. The common 
people heard Him gladly because He came announc- 
ing good tidings to the poor, the despised, neglected 
masses. He was as living water to men dying of 
thirst; as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; 
as a flood of sunlight to those that sat in darkness; 
as a breaker of chains to those that were fast bound 
in misery andiron. And everyone began to ask, ‘Is 
not this the Leader, the Champion, the King, who 
has been expected for centuries? The Messiah is 
about to assert Himself, righteous and having 
salvation, ruling in the fear of the Lord.’ Then 
there had come a lull. The wonderful Prophet 


85 


86 CONCERNING CHRIST 


disappeared, and went off into seclusion with His 
disciples. The religious authorities had thought Him 
a troublesome and dangerous person, who openly 
defied their cherished traditions and privileges, 
and they had no doubt been glad that He was out of 
the way, and hoped never to see Him again. But 
now He had re-appeared. He was known to be 
coming up for the Passover; and as the pilgrim bands 
approached Jerusalem they suddenly gathered 
round Him, and with a spontaneous burst of joy 
greeted Him as the Son of David. Was not the 
parallel with the words of Zechariah too obvious 
to be missed ?>—‘ Behold thy King cometh unto thee, 
meek, and sitting upon an ass.’ And they escorted 
Him to the city with shouts of gladness, while the 
authorities were gnashing their teeth with rage and 
envy at seeing how the whole world had gone after 
Him. It was a great triumph! 

At least it appeared to be a great triumph. The 
Evangelists were artists enough to allow the deep 
irony of the situation to speak for itself. They do 
not say a single word to suggest that it was not a 
real triumph. But our Lord knew it. As soon as 
He reached the city, the whole thing flickered out, 
and He took very good care that it should. His 
Kingdom was not of this world. The one element 
of real triumph in it was the fact that He was 
deliberately riding to His death. If men had known 
it they could have sung ‘Lift up your heads O ye 
gates, and be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors, and 
the King of glory shall come in.’ But the glory 
must be reached through shame. ‘The real triumph 
was reached when He cried, ‘It is finished,’ and 


TRIUMPH 87 


bowed His head and gave up the ghost—the triumph 
of love revealed and perfected in sacrifice. 

And the entry into Jerusalem has been,repeated 
in essence in many a triumph since. For nearly 
three centuries afterwards, Christians were despised 
and hated as the enemies of the human race. They 
were persecuted by emperor after emperor. They 
were thrown to the lions, smeared with pitch and 
burnt alive in public, racked and tortured with every 
conceivable form of cruelty. That was their real 
triumph. But there came a day when they won 
over to their side the emperor himself. The con- 
version of Constantine seemed like a glorious 
triumph, the beginning of a grand movement to 
gather the whole civilized world into the fold of 
Christ. But from that moment the words ‘not of 
this world,’ written on the heart of the Church, began 
to fade and grow dim. When Rome was burnt to 
the ground, the Holy Roman Empire rose from the 
ashes, and held sway for centuries. But just in so 
far as she tried to get the best of both worlds—just 
in so far as she aimed at power instead of crucifixion— 
she failed in the sight of God. 

We pass to our own day, and reach another 
triumph, the triumph of guns over guns. The 
world kept on reiterating, ‘It was a famous victory.’ 
But the irony of Palm Sunday was seen again. 
That which was of eternal value, the element of 
real triumph in it, was the desire in any human 
heart for the assertion of righteousness, and the 
unnamed and unimaginable sacrifices borne for that 
purpose. If the world will not follow that lead, and 
be brought nearer to a share in the Cross of Christ, 


88 CONCERNING CHRIST 


the war with its triumphant ending will be entered 
on the books of Heaven as one of the greatest 
failures ever known. One word, and one word only, 
seems to be branding itself upon the hearts of men, 
and that is ‘money,’ and money especially as a 
means of buying pleasures and amusements. Money, 
of course, is a necessity of life; and as long as there 
are thousands who, through no fault of their own, 
are unable to get the necessities of life, our civiliza- 
tion is a surface triumph, rotten at the core. Never- 
theless the principle stands good: ‘ Ye cannot serve 
God and mammon.’ We have heard the words so 
often that they fail to make the least dint in the 
consciences of many of us. The striving after 
money, and the material things that money brings 
with it, has led the world further from God than it 
was during the time when it was thrilled with the 
spirit of sacrifice. And if so, the war ended in a 
triumph which has as yet been no triumph in the 
eyes of God. 

In the midst of all this there is the Christian 
Church, the Body of Christ, the organ or instrument 
by which He wants to express Himself to the world. 
And His Self-expression is manifestly incomplete if 
it does not include sacrifice, crucifixion. Except the 
world can see in the Church the print of the nails, it 
will not believe. How then does the Church stand? 
Where are its triumphs? They are not in anything 
that the world would count triumphs. If the 
Church were a good business concern, a thriving 
co-operative society, if Christians its shareholders 
were guaranteed not only the joys of Heaven but 
also 12 per cent. on earth, the world would be more 


TRIUMPH 89 


than affable. It will accept God and mammon; it will 
accept mammon alone; but for God alone it has no 
use. Where, then, are the triumphs of the Christian 
Church? You will find them wherever there is 
crucifixion, wherever Christ can accurately express 
His own triumph. You will find them in many over- 
worked fathers and mothers, clergymen, doctors, 
nurses, who are spending the last ounce of their 
strength for others, inspired by the Spirit of Christ 
Jesus. You will find them in many old and feeble 
persons, in many who are burdened with pain or 
weakness, in many quite ordinary people, ignorant 
or obscure, but who are doing secret service to God 
by continual and earnest prayer. You will find 
them in young men and women faced with fearful 
odds in the temptations of life, but whose strength 
is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure. 
You will find them in every man or woman, in any 
occupation, profession, or trade, in any society, 
sect, or party, of any race, country, or colour, who 
puts Christ Crucified first, and everything else in 
heaven or earth or under the earth second and last. 
These are they in whom Christ expresses Himself, 
whose triumph is real and permanent, for whom we 
can pray with hope and confidence, ‘Make them to be 
numbered with Thy saints in glory everlasting.’ 


These were his servants, in His steps they trod, 
Following through death the martyred Son of God. 
Victor He rose; victorious too shall rise 

They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice. 


90 CONCERNING CHRIST 


2. JUDAS. 


‘His words were smoother than butter, having 
war in his heart.’ ‘Mine own familiar friend whom 
I trusted, who did also eat of my bread, hath laid 
great wait forme.’ ‘Have not I chosen you twelve, 
and one of you is a devil.’ We feel that there is 
nothing more terrible in human history than the 
tragedy of Judas Ischariot, the apostle who failed. 
Whenever he is held up as a warning, it is difficult 
to escape an attack of self complacency. To com- 
pare any sins that we have committed with the 
blackest sin on record places us at once at an 
advantage. We have never been guilty of any 
crime compared with his. So we are inclined to 
imagine until we think carefully about it. But we 
must remember that what makes a sin bad in the 
sight of God is not the action itself but the motive. 
If a man out of work steals a five pound note because 
his children are starving, and a prosperous trades- 
man cheats a customer out of 2d., I have no doubt 
at all that the latter is worse in God’s eyes than the 
former. If any of us discovers in himself the same 
motive as that of Judas, all reason for self-com- 
placency has disappeared. It is nothing but circum- 
stances which made us different from him. We can, 
if we like, live in the immediate company of Jesus 
Christ as he did; we can see His wonderful works, and 
hear His wonderful words. We have at least as good 
a chance of becoming disciples as he had. And we 
are disloyal to our Master every day. I don’t want 
to whitewash his sin, but I want us to realize that 
our own are black. 


JUDAS QI 


What was the motive of Judas Ischariot? Weare 
not expressly told, but his storymakes it clear enough. 
In S. John’s Gospel it is said that he was a thief, and 
used to steal money from the common purse. But 
the getting of money was only one result of_his chief 
inner motive. Think for a moment of the facts. 
He was engaged in his trade or occupation whatever 
it was; and there came a day when Jesus passed by 
and said to him, Follow Me. And he arose and 
followed Him. The unearthly power of the Lord’s 
Person drew him as it did the others. In the thrill 
of the first call the chief motive-power of his being 
was for the moment overcome, and ceased to work. 
He had his chance of overcoming it altogether. And 
if he had given himself in real surrender to the 
Master who called him, one of the holiest saints in 
the Church’s calendar might have been S. Judas 
Ischariot. He left home, then, and followed our 
Lord. Then he began to see His marvellous works, 
and to hear His marvellous talks to enthusiastic 
crowds. But I don’t think it was long before a false 
note sounded in his heart. The more popular the 
Prophet of Nazareth became, the more he began to 
feel it a distinction to belong to His small chosen 
band of close companions. Jesus has chosen only 
twelve men, and among them me, Judas! A little 
later on Jesus came into hostility with the scribes and 
Pharisees. Judas no doubt disliked the very strict 
rules of conduct which many of them taught, and 
he probably enjoyed hearing his Master denounce 
these religious teachers and call them hypocrites. 
He could not penetrate to the depths of His moral 
teaching; and to hear the rules denounced would 


92 CONCERNING CHRIST 


give him an easy feeling that he was free from strict 
rules. Then came the moment when he learned 
that Jesus claimed to be the coming Messiah. And 
because he did not understand Him in the least, he 
thought that He meant the kind of Messiah that the 
Jews in general were hoping for—a great Leader who 
would defeat all their enemies and set Himself up as 
King in Jerusalem. When He chose to announce 
Himself, no doubt all these enthusiastic crowds would 
rally round Him, and by some sudden stroke He 
would take the throne, which was after all His by 
right as a descendant of David. And what a 
splendid time that would be. Think of the glory and 
honour of it. I, Judas, will be one of the King’s 
chosen friends, and He will give me part of Palestine 
to govern, and I shall be rich and prosperous beyond 
all dreams. And with these sordid hopes in his 
mind he waited and waited, and nothing happened. 
But then the day came when our Lord rode in 
triumph into Jerusalem. And the multitudes that 
went before and that followed cried saying, ‘ Hosanna 
to the Son of David, blessed is He that cometh in the 
name of the Lord, Hosanna in the Highest.’ And 
Judas would think, Haha! Now the moment has 
come. I wondered what He was waiting for; but 
He was cleverer than I thought. He has only 
waited till He could be surrounded by the multitude 
of pilgrims coming up for the Passover. He is 
gathering them round Him in order to seize the 
throne. Now for a good time! And he waited and 
waited, and still nothing happened. Jesus went 
quietly out of the city night after night, and slept 
on the Mount of Olives; and this unique chance of 


JUDAS 93 


becoming King was thrownaway. Andat last,inan 
outburst of resentment and disappointment he must 
have come to the conclusion that nothing was going 
to happen. He had wasted all these months in 
tramping about Galilee, telling people that the 
kingdom was just going to come; he had given up 
his trade and his home; he had made himself a poor 
man; and all for nothing. So he took his revenge, 
got by it something equivalent to five or six pounds, 
and then committed suicide. 

Now what was his life’s motive? His life’s motive 
was Self. And there are a good many people who 
under the same circumstances would have done the 
same thing. Notice the particular way in which, in 
his case, Self asserted its desires. He thought it was 
an advantage to himself to belong to a particular 
group of persons; one of the Twelve, one of the 
chosen few. And consumed with this thought, all 
the claims of Jesus upon his life and love and 
devotion went for nothing. And that is precisely 
the case with many people to-day. To beamember, 
for instance, of the wealthy or the well-to-do class 
is a distinction in itself, which some men and women 
will do literally anything to reach or to retain. 
Scrupulous honesty and open-hearted kindness, not 
to speak of religion, are simply outside the range of 
their ideas. Religion will do for the poor; and they 
despise the poor. Others feel perfectly satisfied 
with themselves because, by the mere accident of 
birth, they are what are called gentlemen. They 
are thankful that they are not as other men are, who 
don’t know how to behave and speak and dress and 
eat properly. To be a gentleman is so obviously 


94 CONCERNING CHRIST 


the only thing that matters, that religion, worship, 
love, become so-to-speak ungentlemanly, things 
that we don’t talk about in polite society. The 
same thing is seen in other directions. Men and 
women of literary tastes, scholars, authors, journal- 
ists, scientists, artists, and so on—some who are 
members of this or that choice company feel that 
Jesus is not worth considering. And in schools and 
universities it is often the company of the athletic, 
the strong young men who are successful with their 
muscles. They know that other men or boys who 
are not so successful admire them and like to be 
friends with them; they are envied, and sought after, 
and imitated. And all this absorbs them, and 
tempts them to feel that religion is—not out of their 
reach, but—beneath their notice. They and not 
He are supreme in their little world. Every one of 
these cases is simply the case of Judas over again. 
But there is yet another instance, a temptation 
much more subtle, and that is to let Self assert its 
claims under cover of being a member of a religious 
class. Because I perform outward acts of religion 
regularly and carefully, it doesn’t matter if I sin now 
and then, especially if my sin is quite quite secret, and 
no one can possibly know anything about it. There 
are some tragic cases of business men who come to 
Church with unfailing regularity, and are respected 
and honoured members of their congregation, but 
are living two lives. It is said—some have said it to 
me—that business simply cannot be carried on in 
these days of competition with strict and meticulous 
honesty. You’ cannot get on if you never take 
advantage of other people’s ignorance or simplicity; 


JUDAS 95 


you cannot get on if you never represent the value 
of goods to be higher than it really is. You must 
do as other people do, or you will go under in the 
rushing stream of the struggle for life. By ‘going 
under’ they often mean making rather smaller profits 
than they would like to make. But even if it meant 
more than that, they are still faced with the Lord’s 
question, “What shall a man give in exchange for his 
soul?’ The man who is completely engrossed in the 
sheer task of keeping himself and his family alive, 
the man who is perfectly satisfied with his money, or 
his gentlemanliness, his mental achievements, or 
his bodily achievements, is not necessarily a 
hypocrite, whatever other names might suit him. 
But the man who thinks—and the holiest amongst us 
is not free from the danger—that because he is 
religious a few little sins do not matter, that is the 
hypocrite; that is Judas. 

And so, if we want to escape his sin, we must set 
to work to try to bring Self down from its throne. 
Commune with your own heart, and search out your 
spirit, in order to be quite clear about the ways in 
which Self asserts its claim in your life. I don’t 
mean only the blackest and deadliest sins, that is to 
say those which a good early training and a good 
moral environment have led you to feel are the 
blackest and deadliest. You may be perfectly free 
from these, and yet find that Self is reigning. A 
high opinion of your own opinion, or your own 
powers or qualities; a touchy dislike of being shewn 
to have made a mistake; a dread of what you feel 
to be the humiliation of owning to a fault; a cowardly 
fear of what people will think of you. Ora quickness 


96 CONCERNING CHRIST 


to find fault with others; enjoyment in hearing other 
people found fault with and run down; sullenness; 
moodiness; an unforgiving spirit; a lazy thoughtless- 
ness or selfishness that prevents you from doing 
small acts of politeness or courtesy at home, or that 
makes it feel distasteful and a nuisance to have to 
spend time and trouble in doing something for some 
member of the family. Or the sort of selfishness 
that makes some people say of you, ‘ He is so difficult 
and crochetty that nothing seems to please him.’ 
In some cases they say, “Of course, poor thing, it’s 
partly his health; but I do wish he would try a little 
harder not to be so fidgetty and exacting, and not 
to make his health an excuse for everything’. I 
might fill pages with this sort of thing. And it is 
all Self from beginning to end. It really is worth 
while to think very carefully about the motive 
power which rules us, that we be not as ‘ Judas 
Ischariot who also betrayed Him.’ 


3. SILENCE. 


If Judas was disappointed because our Lord did 
nothing to uphold His cause, others were surprised 
that He said nothing. He was brought before 
the ecclesiastical officials of the day, the high priest 
and council, who tried to get false witness against 
Him; no lie was too brazen, no insinuation too base. 
And the high priest arose and said unto him, 
“Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these 
witness against thee?’ He did his very best to 
extort something from the young Prisoner whom 
they were determined to kill. But the great 
official was met by a silence baffling and invincible. 


SILENCE 97 


‘Jesus held His peace.’ Then He was taken to a 
still greater official, the procurator who represented 
the dread power of Rome. ‘And when He was 
accused by the chief priests and elders He answered 
nothing. Then saith Pilate unto Him, Hearest thou 
not how many things they witness against thee? 
And He gave him no answer, not even to a word.’ 
And once more, Pilate sent Him to Herod, the 
provincial official, the half-bred, vulgar sensualist, 
who had killed one prophet, and was pleased to see 
another because he hoped to while away half-an-hour 
of idleness by seeing Him do something magical. 
“And he questioned Him in many words; but He 
answered him nothing’. | 

In the margin of the Authorized Version there is 
a reference here to Isaiah liti. 3. Our minds perhaps 
turn to the words in v. 7: ‘He is brought as a 
lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her 
shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ 
The words illustrate the meekness and gentleness 
of Christ. But I feel sure that that does not exhaust 
the meaning of His silence. He was a despised 
Prisoner on His trial, but in each case He stood 
and judged His accusers. They knew that their 
accusations were false, and the dignity of His 
impenetrable silence stung them like a lash. It 
was a momentary vision of ‘the wrath of the 
Lamb.’ . 

Jesus was on His trial. And He is on His trial 
still. I make no apology for the expression. <A 
religion which is not merely a competitor among 
many competitors but claims to be the one religion 
which alone can satisfy the needs of the world, the 


H 


98 CONCERNING CHRIST 


one religion of whose central light all the truths 
which are seen in other religions are only 
partial reflexions, must obviously be on its trial. 
And men and women are questioning its claims. ° 
It is always before the eyes of the world. Some 
reject it on intellectual grounds; others refuse what 
they think are its burdens. Christ Crucified is to 
a few the power and wisdom of God, to many He is 
a stumbling-block, to many more He is foolishness. 
But the one thing they cannot do is to let Him 
alone. He is so real even to His foes that they 
cannot help spending their energies on Him. They 
must denounce Him, mock Him, crucify Him 
afresh; but they cannot bury Him out of sight 
and keep His tomb sealed. He still stands a 
Presence that the world can feel; and still on His 
trial. 

And how does He defend Himself? Look at His 
judges, as types to be found in modern Europe. 
Pilate was a heathen, simply and frankly pagan, 
to whom the Jews were a troublesome mob of bar- 
barous Orientals whom he was obliged to keep in 
order with the whip of Roman discipline. The absurd 
claims of a village carpenter would never have come ~ 
to his notice if they had not been forced upon him. 
Is there a town, is there a street, in our own country 
in which you will not find some heathen, though they 
are probably baptized heathen?—people who are 
entirely devoid any religion whatsoever. And 
the claims of Jesus Christ would never cross their 
minds if they were not forced upon them by the 
accusations of His opponents. They cannot help 
seeing the papers, they cannot help hearing religion 


SILENCE 99 


pulled to pieces in club, and workshop, in office and 
factory. Like Pilate they hear about Christ only 
from the criticisms brought against Him. 

And how does He defend Himself before the 
modern European heathen? He holds His peace. 
His handful of followers who love and worship Him 
are sometimes tempted to wish that he would 
openly defend His cause against the ungodly people. 
But no! Heathen were, in fact, drawn to His feet in 
millions, but it was not by any answer to His 
accusers in the presence of Pilate. | 

And beside the out-and-out heathen, there are 
Herods to-day. Herod was nearly a foreigner, 
but he had enough Jewish blood in his veins to 
enable him to pose as a Jew. He was an immoral 
man, whose life was one long pretence. He had 
moods when he could actually enjoy conversations 
with John the Baptist, and he had other moods 
when he could enjoy the licentious after-dinner 
performance of a dancing girl. And some of those 
who question Christ to-day, and listen to accusa- 
tions against Him are people with uncleanness in 
their lives, whose pose of being Christian is one 
long pretence. They have moods when they can 
actually enjoy a musical service and some sorts of 
sermons, and they have other moods in which it is 
a shame even to speak of those things that are 
done of them in secret. And against such Christ 
says nothing to defend Himself. He would not 
pander to Herod’s flippant curiosity; and He will 
not pander to the dilettante flirting with religion 
that He sees in some of those who write themselves 
down as members of a Christian Church. He will 


100 CONCERNING CHRIST 


make no attempt to force conviction on those who 
have no wish to be convinced. 

And then there was Caiaphas. Caiaphas was a 
real Jew, the chief Jewish ruler. And he was 
horribly afraid of Jesus because of His claim to be 
the ideal Ruler of the future, the Messiah Himself. 
He was afraid his own personal interests would be 
impaired. John the Baptist had been only a 
prophet: he had not claimed to be anything else; 
and so the priestly rulers never laid a finger on him. 
A preacher of repentance did not trouble them. 
But Jesus claimed too much. Though He made — 
no answer to His accusers, He asserted before both 
Caiaphas and Pilate His tremendous claim to be 
the coming Messiah. And that is the complaint 
to-day. He claims too much. If He only asked 
men for morality, no one except the Herods would 
mind very much. But He claims a_ personal 
supremacy, He demands an allegiance to which all 
interests must bow. ‘Verily J say unto you.’ 
“He that loveth father or mother more than Me 
is not worthy of Me; he that loveth son or daughter 
more than Me is not worthy of Me.’ ‘He that 
taketh not up his cross and followeth after Me 
cannot be My disciple.’ ‘Sell all that thou hast 
and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure 
in heaven, and come follow Me.’ Matthew from 
the receipt of custom, the sons of Zebedee from 
their boats, the other disciples, several women, some 
of them rich women, from their comfortable homes 
in Galilee—all were called, with a summons to 
which they could not shut their ears, called to 
follow One who had nowhere to lay His head until 


SILENCE IOI 


at last He laid it upon the Cross. His claim is 
supreme with no conceivable limits or modifications. 
He expects men not to allow family comforts, or 
even family love, to supersede their love for Him. 
He expects rulers to rule as Christians, as His 
deputies, passing no laws that He cannot sanction. 
He expects that men of business shall take part 
only in such transactions as He can approve, and 
gain only such dividends as He can endorse. He 
expects lawyers in their office and in the courts to 
be clothed with truth and honesty, a truth and 
honesty that will not shew threadbare when seen 
in the searching light of the Sun of Righteousness. 
He expects thinkers and scholars to feel sure that 
their results and conclusions, however logical they 
may seem, are mistaken if they are such as to put 
them out of sympathy with Him. He expects 
the clergy and all Christian workers to work not for 
gain or praise or popularity or success, or any sort 
or kind of satisfaction or self-congratulation, but 
only and solely for Him. He expects all men and 
women and children in their daily work and recrea- 
tions, in their hopes and sorrows and fears and joys, 
to put Him first, and everything else visible or 
invisible second. And, as I say, the complaint is 
that He claims too much. And when this accusa- 
tion is brought against Him, He says nothing to 
defend Himself; He answers nothing; He does 
nothing to cajole or force men into yielding to Him. 
He goes on asserting His tremendous claim. 

And His true worshippers, again, are tempted to 
ask, ‘Answerest Thou nothing? Hearest Thou not 
what things these witness against Thee? How 


102 CONCERNING CHRIST 


long shall the adversary do this dishonour, how 
long shall the enemy blaspheme Thy name for 
ever? Why withdrawest Thou Thy hand? Why 
pluckest Thou not Thy right hand out of Thy 
bosom to consume the enemy?’ But against 
His accusers Jesus holds His peace. 

And yet His cause is not hopeless. It was not 
hopeless when He was tried in Jerusalem, or else 
Christianity would have failed. He did not leave 
Himself without witness; He needed no witness but 
Himself; the dignity, the purity, the tender humility, 
the steely strength of the Son of God. It was the 
Man Himself who was unanswerable. And Pilate 
pronounced Him innocent, and Herod pronounced 
Him innocent, and Caiaphas had to search for 
witnesses against Him because he knew He was 
innocent. And yet not one of them released Him. 
His cause seemed a failure. But it was not; by 
His Resurrection He is alive for evermore, and to 
all His accusers He presents, as His only answer, 
Himself in the lives of His followers, Himself in 
His Body the Catholic Church. That was what © 
conquered the ancient world, and that will conquer 
the modern world. Christianity is only nineteen 
centuries old; and what is that among so many 
countless ages of our planet’s history? He can 
afford to wait. But the victory will come. The 
risen Christ will win it, as a dead Christ could never 
have done, by Himself revealed in those in whom 
His Spirit lives. 

When we say, therefore, that Christ is on His 
trial, it means also that Christians are on their 
trial, because Christianity is Christ. Caiaphas 


SIMON THE CYRENIAN 103 


hates Him because He claims too much; and the 
Christians whom the modern Caiaphas meets every 
day must support that claim. Pilate the heathen 
scorns Him as unworthy of his notice; and the 
Christians whom the modern Pilate meets every day 
must be ready to bear his scorn. Herod the 
sensualist is inclined to be amused at Him, and 
mocks Him; and the Christians whom the modern 
Herod meets every day must be ready to stand up 
to the sensualist and suffer his mockery. Christians 
are to be marked men in any society; they are to 
represent Christ on His trial. Before His-accusers 
He holds His peace; but He must win His cause by 
shewing them—Himself. 


4. SIMON THE CYRENIAN. 


Our meditations carry us forward to Good Friday. 
But on Good Friday itself it is difficult to think of 
anyone except Jesus Christ. At about nine o’clock 
on that terrible, wonderful morning Pilate sat on 
the judgment seat with soldiers standing beside 
him. And there was the crowd of people with the 
priests and Pharisees egging them on to shout, 
Crucify Him. But we can hardly look at them; 
our eyes are held by the one Man who has been 
despised and hated, betrayed by His friend, mocked, 
spit upon, scourged, the central Figure in that 
howling mob. And then the trial ends, and the 
soldiers under command of a centurion march Him 
off, making Him carry the heavy beam of wood for 
His own torturing death. And as we follow, we 
see Him, utterly spent with the scourging, stagger 
under the load and fall to the ground. A bystander 


104 CONCERNING CHRIST .- 


is forced to help Him to carry it, but again we can 
scarcely think of him; we can only gaze at the 
Prisoner as He is dragged to His feet and marched 
forward again. 

It is natural that on Good Friday we cannot pay 
much attention to Simon the Cyrenian. But it is 
worth while at some other time to spend a few 
moments on his story. He was a Jew, who lived in 
the North of Africa, and had come to Jerusalem. 
He had probably come for the Feast of the Passover, 
or possibly he was a person who did not trouble 
much about Passovers, and had come chiefly on 
business. He must have been fairly well off, or 
he could not have afforded the expense of the 
journey. J imagine him to have been an ordinary 
well-to-do merchant. And he was walking into the 
city that morning. No doubt he moved to the side 
of the road as the crowd reached him, and perhaps 
felt a moment’s pity for the poor wretch who was 
going to his death, perhaps a slave who had run 
away from, or killed, his Roman master, or some- 
thing of that sort. And yet it was curious. It 
could hardly have been a mere slave, or there would 
not be such a crowd; and the Prisoner himself did 
not look like a slave. He must be one of the rebels 
in the recent insurrection, a murderer or malefactor 
of some kind; though he did not look like that either. 
Just then the Prisoner fell down; and he probably 
thought, Poor thing, the scourging must have 
been too much for him; how cruel these Romans 
are! 

And then, before he knew what was going to 
happen, something awful occurred! A_ soldier 


SIMON THE CYRENIAN 105 


suddenly caught hold of him and dragged him up to 
the Prisoner. He no doubt struggled, but it was 
of no use struggling. Ata sharp word of command 
the march began again, and there he was, a respect- 
able merchant with a good business connexion in 
Cyrene, walking back the way he had come, carrying 
on his shoulder one end of the beam of wood. 
You can almost imagine some of the crowd making 
jokes at him, and trying to be funny. Was he 
dreaming? It was worse than any nightmare. 
Fancy if any of his friends at home could see him. 
Of course he would never mention it to a soul, but 
he could not forget the awful disgrace and humilia- 
tion as long as he lived. 

It is a strange scene when you come to think of it 
—the sudden upheaval of a man’s life by the un- 
lucky chance of the moment. Think how many a 
few years ago learnt to sympathize with him. 
Countless men and women in all the continents 
of the globe were leading quiet, prosperous lives in 
every sort of profession, business, and trade. And 
then, quite suddenly, the awful thing happened. 
They were snatched from their homes, and life was 
turned upside down. They found themselves en- 
gaged in occupations such as they never dreamt of, 
and plunged into hardships, peril, and pain, due— 
as Simon’s misfortune was due—to a foreign power 
which sought to dominate the world with the iron 
hand of a military despotism. The mass of trouble 
in the great war was so frightful on the surface 
that it seemed like a nightmare. But those who 
looked below the surface could apply to every 
sufferer—and many are suffering still—the words 


106 CONCERNING CHRIST 


that S. Matthew uses of Simon, ‘him they compelled 
to bear His Cross.’ 

And apart from the war there always have been, 
and always will be, and certainly there are to-day, 
troubles laid upon men’s lives due to no fault of their 
own, thrust upon them by the greed or ignorance 
or stupidity or wickedness of others, and troubles 
thrust upon them simply by circumstances over 
which they have no control, by an accident, a 
bereavement, an illness, or a business failure, or a 
bad harvest. They seem to be mere victims of a 
purposeless fate. But in every single case it 
depends upon the man himself whether he is a mere 
victim or something very much better. We who 
know what Christ’s sufferings and death mean to 
the world can look at Simon the Cyrenian, and 
when we read the words, ‘him they compelled to 
bear His Cross,’ we can understand that he was 
called to a great privilege, to the vast honour of 
helping Christ. 

Let us think a little of this honour and privilege. 
The world is so made that God’s great purposes 
cannot be worked out without suffering. Why it is 
so made is a mystery, that our little minds cannot 
at present fully understand. But it is so made. 
And the one thing that prevents the mystery from 
being a burden too heavy for the strength of man 
to bear is the truth that God shares in the suffering. 
God is not a huge Individual, a sort of glorified 
Man living away up in the clouds and watching 
from a distance the agonies of men. God is Love; 
and Love includes a giving out of Himself in sym- 
pathy. By His sharing of His Personality with us, 


SIMON THE CYRENIAN 107 


His life is the life which isin allmen. And therefore 
He feels in all men moment by moment the sufferings 
and sorrows of all men. He feels their pains and 
He feels their sins as if they were His own, because 
He is Love. And because God so loved the world, 
He entered into human life; the Man who was born 
and lived and suffered and died was God; when 
Christ carried His Cross on the road to Calvary 
it was God suffering in man. But that does not 
release man from the necessity of suffering. Man 
is given strength to bear it by the knowledge that 
God is suffering in him and with him. If a man 
is shot in the arm, it is not simply his arm that feels 
the pain; the whole man feels the pain zm his arm. 
So when I suffer trouble, it is not simply I, it is the 
whole life of Christ living in mankind that suffers 
trouble in me as a member of His Body. God and 
I are in the closest living co-operation. Are we not 
right in saying that it is a privilege and an honour? 
You, in all your pains and sorrows can help Christ, 
who is Godin mankind. Christ was crucified for the 
world, and you are compelled to bear His Cross. 
Try to think of it when you feel ill or overtired; 
when things are going wrong at home and you don’t 
know how to put them right; think of it if you feel 
you are being badly or harshly or unjustly treated; 
if circumstances have prevented you from following 
some occupation or pursuit or profession which you 
would have enjoyed, and for which you seemed 
to be really fitted, and you are tempted to complain 
that the best of your life is being wasted; think of it 
when someone that you love has been caught away 
to be with the Lord, and you don’t know how you 


108 CONCERNING CHRIST 


can go on all the remaining years of your life without 
him. Try to say to yourself, ‘I am compelled to 
bear His Cross.’ And try hard not to say, ‘Why 
are some other people not compelled to bear it?’ but 
simply go on thanking Him for giving you the 
privilege. 

But let us get back to the story again. There 
is one thing that we are not told, and yet I feel as 
certain of it as if it were written in the Gospel in 
black and white, and that is that when Simon was 
compelled to bear the Cross Jesus thanked him. If 
the Lord turned and looked on Simon Peter when 
he denied Him, with a look that changed him from a 
coward into a penitent—which is the frst step 
towards becoming a hero—I am sure that He turned 
and looked on Simon the Cyrenian when he helped 
Him. And if so, the look and the words of thanks 
must have begun to change him from an angry, 
injured man into a humble and devoted follower. 
Indeed we have almost evidence for it. Have you 
ever thought why S. Mark takes the trouble to 
add to the story the statement that Simon was the 
father of Alexander and Rufus? It seems at first 
sight so pointless. But if you were telling a story 
about someone, and said he was the father of 
So-and-so, just mentioning two names, it would 
clearly imply that his sons were already known to 
your hearers. When S. Mark wrote his Gospel 
several years after our Lord’s death, Alexander and 
Rufus were evidently well known to his readers. 
That is they were probably well known Christians. 
And I cannot help thinking that they were brought 
up as Christians because their father had become 


PILATE’S PLACARD 109 


a follower of Christ. Being compelled to bear His 
Cross, He followed Him bearing it all the remaining 
years of his life. 

If you will gladly take up His Cross to help Him, 
the cross that you are compelled to bear whether 
you like it or not, you will be like the volunteer 
in the war who, after being rejected on medical 
grounds, was conscripted; but because he rejoiced 
at being conscripted, the compulsion never had any 
meaning for him; in spirit he joined as a free volun- 
teer. And if you can see Christ’s look of love and 
compassionate gratitude, and hear His words of 
thanks, your life will not be wasted whatever 
becomes of you. Your trouble will do what God 
wants it to do; it will help to make you a better 
Christian, and that will help to make your children 
or other people better Christians. When you look 
back at some of the years of your life, so deeply 
marked with trouble or suffering, you will say, 
‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted’; 
‘before I was troubled I went wrong, but now have 
I kept Thy word.’ 


5. PILATE’S PLACARD. 


Pilate was an unusually bad specimen of a Roman 
governor, sent to rule over the most difficult nation 
in the whole empire at a time when the spirit of 
rebellion was just beginning to boil over. There 
had been some insurrections already, and one after 
another they had been crushed with an iron hand, 
and the leaders put to death. And so when the 
young Carpenter of Galilee had been drawing 
crowds by His preaching, and had brought upon 


IIO CONCERNING. CHRIST 


Himself the hatred of the scribes and Pharisees by 
denouncing some of the most deeply rooted notions 
of Jewish conservatism, it was easy for them to 
have Him arrested, and to bring Him up before 
Pilate on a charge of insurrection. A robber 
bandit was at that moment lying in prison awaiting 
execution for that very crime. But they supported 
their charge against Jesus by giving evidence that 
He had claimed to be King of the Jews. Pilate 
himself was on the verge of public disgrace for his 
gross corruption and bad government, and he could 
not afford to stand out in a matter so trifling as the 
execution of one young man from the country. But 
in letting them have their way he managed to get in 
a touch of scornful spite by putting on the placard 
over the Cross the words, ‘The King of the Jews,’ 
in three languages for all to read. It was an official 
insult to the nation that he was sent to govern, 
a jibe that would rankle in the mind of every Jew 
who saw it. And when their leaders begged him to 
alter it, and put ‘He said, I am the King of the 
Jews,’ Pilate enjoyed his little joke to the full, and 
of course refused to change it. ‘What I have 
written I have written.’ 

But the evangelist who records the incident saw, 
and we who read his story can see, the deep and 
far-reaching irony of the situation. Like Caiaphas, 
who said that it was expedient for one man to die 
for the people, Pilate proclaimed more than he 
knew. What he had written would take more than 
the might of the whole Roman empire to wipe out. 
Shortly before, he had asked ‘What is truth?’ 
but now he had written it, and the truth once 


PILATES; PLACARD III 


written is beyond the power of any man to 
erase. 

And we are always doing it. We are always 
writing inscriptions which cannot be rubbed out. 
We are daily writing, as on a placard for all to see, 
a true and accurate description of our own characters. 
We see other people’s mistakes; it is always perfectly 
easy to find faults in other people, and to run them 
down; some of us are doing it every day. We 
cannot help reading what they have written on their 
placard; their faults are so obvious that only the 
blind could fail to see them. But the terrible irony 
of the situation is that we possess a placard of our 
own, and we write upon it in large letters that 
everyone can see except ourselves, a true and 
accurate statement of what we are. At every 
moment, by thought, word, and deed, by look, and 
manner, and behaviour, we are writing on it, ‘This— 
or this—or this is the king of my heart.’ Some- 
times it is one king who reigns supreme for a long 
time; one dominating fault which spoils us. Some- 
times it is legion. But whatever it is, the writing 
on our placard is often many times more visible 
to everyone else than to ourselves. What we have 
written we have written. 

But if that were all, it would not matter very 
much. If it only meant that other people get a 
worse idea of us than we have of ourselves, not 
much harm would be done. We could be content 
with saying, ‘Well, I suppose it’s only natural; 
everyone is a little blind to his own faults. And if 
other people think me worse than I think myself, 
at any rate they are kind and polite, and don’t say 


112 CONCERNING CHRIST 


so—to me; so we all get along pretty comfortably 
together. And besides, no one really knows what 
temptations I have. They may see me looking 
irritable, but they have no idea how trying So-and-so 
is whom I have to live with; they may think me 
listless or discontented, but I cannot tell them how 
I long for a different occupation in life, something 
better and larger in which the powers that I am 
perfectly certain I possess could have freer play. 
They may see one or other of my faults and foibles, 
but they cannot understand how much I have been 
affected by circumstances, or upbringing, or sur- 
roundings, or temperament, or physical weakness, 
or this or that or the other explanation that I can 
offer for almost every sin and failing that I have.’ 
Now if that were all, as I say, it would not matter 
very much. It would be open to anyone to say, 
‘My soul is my own and nobody else’s; and if I 
choose to spoil it, it is no one’s concern but mine.’ 
Oh! what can be done to make people realize that 
that is not true? My soul and other people’s souls, 
my character and other people’s characters, are not 
like so many wooden placards standing up over 
against one another, separate, distant, and distinct. 
The soul is a thing so mysterious, so complex, so 
inconceivably sensitive, that when we really begin 
to think about it, it almost frightens us that we are 
entrusted with a possession so marvellous. Every 
thought, word, and deed, every physical sensation 
or mental emotion, engraves its indelible writing 
upon our soul. 

That is awful enough; but more awful still is the 
fact that our soul cannot come into contact with 


PILATE’S PLACARD 113 


another soul without writing something on it. 
No soul that you have had anything to do with is 
exactly the same as it was a minute ago. You have 
done something to it by what you are; you have 
written something upon it; something in you has 
become a living part of someone else; your soul 
has boldly, ruthlessly, entered into the soul of 
another person, and left its mark upon it. Try 
in some quiet moment to think of this fearful 
mystery; always, unceasingly, there is going on this 
interpenetration of souls. And since souls are 
independent of time and space, we can place no 
limit to the possibilities and the extent of the 
mystery. When I have made a black mark upon 
another person’s soul, and it has become a part of 
his being, he may inflict the effects of it upon others, 
and they yet again upon others, and the bad 
influence rages on in ever widening circles. What I 
have written I have written. If we could see or 
measure a millionth part of the injury that we have 
done to the souls of men, it would be more than we 
could bear. Most of us don’t feel a bit sinful; 
most of us are content with being quite respectably 
good and reasonably pious. And yet behind 
us are the years in which anything bad in us has 
been circulating in the form of influence among the 
souls of men, handed on throughout the great 
network of humanity to the ends of the earth. 

It would be too terrible for us if that were all 
that had to be said. But in the mercy of God there 
is more. Beneath all that we have written on the 
souls of others there can be seen, asin some ancient 
manuscripts, an older and more important writing, 


I 


II4 CONCERNING CHRIST 


written with the finger of God. By the entrance of 
Jesus Christ into the world the perfect divine writing 
was inscribed upon humanity; He was the Word 
made Flesh. And His influence, and the atoning 
power of His life and death, and the indwelling of 
His Spirit, are spreading and expanding, like our 
influence, in ever widening circles. One soul telleth 
another, and one life certifieth another; there is 
neither age nor generation, but His voice is heard 
among them; His Spirit is gone out into all lands, 
and His grace unto the ends of the earth. In spite 
of all our badness, in spite of our ever-spreading 
harmful influence, God looks upon the Word made 
Flesh and says, ‘What I have written I have 
written.’ 

And from that radiating centre, that vital nucleus, 
we can get our life. We can eat and drink His 
influence, we can breathe it in prayer, we can be 
washed clean in it by penitence. And if so, the 
terrible truth of the interpenetration of all souls 
is lit with a beautiful light. If our soul—in pro- 
portion as our soul—is filled, permeated, saturated, 
steeped, with the influence of God, we shall be His 
instruments in leading men to write across their 
lives the inscription, ‘This is Jesus the King of my 
heart.’ 


6. JOSEPH OF ARIMATHAEA. 


The end is drawing very near; but the last 
incident provides us with a beautiful picture to 
think about. It is beautiful because it depicts the 
growth of a man’s soul. We know only three main 
facts about Joseph of Arimathaea, but they mark 


JOSEPH OF ARIMATHAEA II5 


three stages of progress. When someone dies men 
say, Ah! what a good man he was; he did this, and 
he did that, and he did the other; he was so kind, 
so honourable, so this and that and the other. 
But God, into whose closer presence he has passed, 
will not ask him, What good things did you do? 
What good virtues did you shew? He will ask 
the one searching question, Why? What was your 
motive in it all? It is growth in the beauty and 
purity of motives that is the measure of the growth 
of the soul. And that growth we can trace in the 
story of Joseph. We know nothing about him 
before he became a disciple of Jesus Christ. We are 
not told of his conversion, or of any great change 
or upheaval in his life. We must take him as he 
first appears on the scene, and think of him as 
representing what we should call ordinary, average 
Christians. 

Now there are some Christians—more especially 
men, I think, than women—who feel that a man’s 
religion is a deeper and truer thing if he keeps it 
to himself. They are almost ready to measure the 
sincerity of his Christianity by the extent to which 
he hides it. And that is not so entirely mistaken 
as it mght appear at first sight. There is a good 
deal in it. Christ said, ‘Take heed that ye do not 
your righteousness—your alms and prayer and 
fasting—to be seen of men’; but do them ‘in 
secret, that your Father which seeth in secret may 
reward you openly.’ There are numbers of men 
who say to themselves in effect, ‘I’m not going to 
set up for being better thanI am. I’m not an extra 
good man. But at least I’m not a hypocrite,’ 


116 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Joseph of Arimathaea, we are told, was a disciple 
of Jesus, but secretly. Quite right too, some would 
say; I think all the better of him for not making a 
display of it. But the thing is not really as simple 
as that. In the very same Sermon on the Mount in 
which Christ tells us not to do good things to be 
seen of men, He says, “Let your light so shine before 
men that they may see your good works, and glorify 
your Father which is in heaven.’ Which is it to be? 
Are we to hide our religion, or to shew it? And 
the only answer is that it depends upon the motive. 
These men who keep their religion under lock and 
key, and hide their light under a bushel, and say 
they are not hypocrites, will one day pass into the 
other life, and God will ask Why? Why did you 
hide your religion? They will then have to speak 
the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Andina 
good many cases they will have to confess that their 
real motive was that of Joseph of Arimathaea. He 
was ‘a disciple, but secretly for fear of the Jews.’ 
Oh the pity of it! Their one brief life on earth has 
flitted by, and it was a life spoilt by fear. They 
were afraid of their friends, afraid of their relations 
at home, afraid of their servants. A shy, nervous 
self-consciousness, if nothing worse, made them 
shrink from letting people see that they wanted to 
follow Christ. And they lost their short, splendid 
opportunity of letting their light shine that men 
might glorify their Father which is in Heaven. 

We can understand better why Joseph was so 
afraid when we read a little more about him. 
S. Matthew says that he was rich; S. Mark that he 
was ‘of honourable estate,’ as the Revised Version 


JOSEPH OF ARIMATHAEA II7 


has it. A well-to-do, highly respected man, moving 
the best Jerusalem society. How could he let 
it be known that he was mixing himself up with a 
Carpenter, some fishermen, a tax-gatherer, and I 
don’t know what else? The scorn of his rich, 
Jewish friends was too much to be risked. And 
S. Mark and S. Luke say also that he was a councillor, 
which may mean that he was a member of the great 
council of the Sanhedrin. At any rate, he must 
have had plenty of friends in it, and knew all that 
was going on. 

But there came a day when the council sank to a 
deed of shame. They bribed a disciple of Jesus 
to betray Him; they hired a gang of men to seize 
Him by night under the guidance of the traitor. 
They left Him till morning to the brutal insults 
of the high priest’s servants, and then held a so- 
called trial at which they searched for witnesses 
against an innocent man. And when He had been 
officially declared innocent in the Roman court, they 
excited the ignorant fury of the crowd until Pilate 
gave way. All this was too much for Joseph. 
He had been afraid of owning to his secret friendship 
for the country Carpenter, but he had the instincts 
of a straight and decent man. S. Luke says that he 
had ‘not consented to their counsel and deed,’ 
which implies that he had spoken out, and shewn 
his disgust at the foul meanness and cruelty of the 
whole transaction. 

Here then was real progress. A false self-respect 
had made him afraid before, but a true self-respect 
now made him speak and act likea man. And that 
is the point which many Christians have reached. 


118 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Jesus Christ is really sacred to them; their respect 
for Him is high enough to make it impossible for 
them to speak against Him, or to join in anything 
base, or immoral, or anti-Christian. And without 
saying much about it they have a real respect for 
genuinely religious people. They would not dream 
of sneering at them or opposing them in any way; 
and they would openly object if they thought that 
they were being badly or unfairly treated on account 
of their religion. And we may thank God for it. 
We may thank Him that there are true men and 
women whose self-respect keeps them from sinking 
to the level of the lowest minds in the society 
in which they live. It is a good motive. Is there 
anything better or higher than that? 

There is; and Joseph of Arimathaea found it. 
Like S. Paul he shews us a more excellent way. 
He took the last and greatest step forward. He 
had risen from a false to a true self-respect. But 
now he reached a point where all thought of self- 
respect, all thought of self in any form or shape, bad 
or good, was left far behind. We look at him on 
Good Friday afternoon at about four or five o’clock. 
The long agony of the Cross is over. The Sufferer’s 
body hangs mangled and helpless in death. And 
the grandeur of His sacrifice, the majesty of His 
meekness, His cry for the forgiveness of those who 
pierced Him, and all the incidents one by one of that 
supreme triumph over limitless suffering, forced 
their way into the soul of this rich councillor of 
honourable estate. What was self-respect in the 
face of such kingliness? What mattered wealth 
and respectability and convention and prestige and 


SACRIFICE 119 


public opinion in the blinding light of that royal 
Self-emptying? His burning indignation at the 
wrong that had been done passed into a burning 
love for Him who suffered. And in the heat of it 
the iron chain of fear, that used to bind him, shrivelled 
up like cotton in a flame. He went in boldly unto 
Pilate, and begged for the body of Jesus. He 
positively revelled in the scorn of his rich Jewish 
friends, which formerly he had not dared to risk. 
He bought linen; he took down the tortured corpse 
in open view of all onlookers; he wrapped it with 
tender reverence, and bore it in the full light of day 
to the new tomb which he had just hewn in the rock 
for his own sumptuous burial when the time should 
come. He had taken the last step forward. The 
love of Christ constrained him, and the divine 
motive of a responding love swamped his fear, 
swamped his self-respect, flooded every fibre of his 
being, and became—we may be quite sure—his one 
inspiring, driving motive for the rest of his life. 

It was because he had seen Christ die. And 
that can change us also from secret, frightened 
disciples, and from merely self-respecting disciples, 
into lovers—lovers of Him who suffered under 
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, 
for us men and for our salvation. 


7. SACRIFICE. 


The end of the earthly life has come; the Lord 
has reached the grave and gate of death; and we are 
free to pass from the incidents and persons con- 
nected with His Passion and to think about the 
meaning of it all. S. Paul says in the Epistle to the 


120 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Ephesians, ‘God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven 
you,’ or more strictly, as the Greek has it, ‘God in 
Christ hath forgiven you.’ But why ‘for Christ’s 
sake’ or ‘in Christ’? Some might object to the 
question even being asked, because it seems to imply 
that there isa doubt about the matter. The doctrine 
that God forgives us because Christ died has been 
taught in all the ages of the Church’s life as one of 
the foundation stones of Christianity. Does not the 
question suggest that the foundation is not quite 
firm? And yet, if we are to understand it better 
we must ask questions. If God forgives us because 
Christ died, are we to conclude that no one was 
forgiven before that event? Many people in Old 
Testament times repented of their sins centuries 
before Christ’s death; and they were confident that 
they received instant and complete forgiveness. 
Are we to say that their confidence was mistaken ? 
Did the writer of the fifty-first Psalm, for instance, 
receive no forgiveness because Christ had not yet 
died? Some writers recently have felt this to be a 
real difficulty. But they have tried to explain 
it by explaining it away. The Old Testament, and 
indeed our Lord’s own teaching, shew that for- 
giveness comes straight from God; if a man repents, 
God freely and fully forgives him. And so they 
say that Christ’s death has nothing to do with it. 
And when we meet with statements in the Epistles 
to the effect that we are forgiven because Christ 
died, we can simply disregard them. The Epistles 
were written by men of the Jewish race, who had 
not managed to rid their minds entirely of the old 
Jewish notion of the necessity of sacrifice for 


SACRIFICE I2I 


forgiveness; and though they knew, of course, that 
in Christianity the ancient system of animal sacrifices 
had gone for ever, yet they held that the principle 
remained the same; God forgives us because of 
Christ’s sacrifice. So, we are told, we must discard 
this relic of old-world ideas, and go back to the 
simple teaching that God forgives only and egal 
because a man repents. 

Now if it were really a case of choosing between 
our Lord’s teaching on forgiveness and that of the 
' Epistles, no one would hesitate in his decision. 
But when we look into the matter we are faced with 
another difficulty. According to S. Mark’s Gospel, 
the earliest of the four, our Lord Himself said that 
the Son of Man had come ‘to give His life a ransom 
formany. And at the Last Supper, again according 
to S. Mark, He uttered the great words, ‘This is 
My Blood of the Covenant, which is being shed for 
many. The value of His sacrifice, therefore, is 
not a theory confined to the Epistles. Some writers 
assume that these passages are not genuine; but 
that is only because they are convinced that all idea 
of sacrifice must be eliminated from our Lord’s 
teaching. They think, further, that even if He 
actually spoke the words they must be neglected 
as relics of Jewish thought, inconsistent with His 
other utterances. 

But is there no other way out of the difficulty 
than to assume that S. Mark introduced sayings 
which contradicted our Lord’s teaching, or that 
Jesus contradicted Himself? Let us look further. 
It is noteworthy that in the Old Testament exactly 
the same contradiction seems to appear. On the 


122 CONCERNING CHRIST 


one hand there was the full and elaborate system 
of sacrifice which grew up during Israel’s history, 
and is seen chiefly in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, 
and Ezekiel. And on the other hand we hear 
prophets and Psalmists declaring that God does not 
want sacrifices. ‘I will have mercy and not 
sacrifice.’ ‘To what purpose is the multitude of 
your sacrifices unto Me? saith the Lord.’ ‘I 
delight not in the blood of bullocks or of rams or of 
he-goats.’ ‘Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would 
I give it Thee; but Thou delightest not in burnt- 
offerings. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit, 
a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt Thou not 
despise.’ | 
The difficulty in the Old Testament arose from 
the fact that a wrong notion was formed of what 
sacrifice ought really to mean. Men imagined that 
anyone who had sinned could simply kill an animal 
and burn its carcase on the altar, and that instead 
of punishing him for his sin God would accept 
the animal. It was a mere substitution of an ox 
or a sheep for a man. And the prophets and 
Psalmists all thought that that was what it meant, 
but they were spiritually-minded enough to see 
that the thing was absurd; and so they said that 
God did not want any sacrifices at all. And if that 
were really the meaning of sacrifice, I should be 
ready to reject at once the idea that Christ’s death 
was a Sacrifice for our sins. Not even the New 
Testament writers would convince me if they 
taught that God punished His Son who had 
not sinned, and let off all the rest of mankind who 
had. What would be a shameful injustice if 


SACRIFICE 123 


done by man cannot be glorious justice if done by 
God. 

What, then, is the real inner meaning of sacrifice? 
It is first and foremost Self-oftering. Nothing which 
takes the place of that is of the slightest use; nothing 
else will satisfy God. He wants us, our will, our 
love, our whole being to be given to Him; He wants 
us to live for Him, to spend ourselves in making the 
world better for Him, to do everything with the sole 
purpose of pleasing Him. The word ~sacrifice’ 
means ‘a making sacred’; He wants us to make our- 
selves sacred, delivered up to Him for His possession 
and use and delight. And God will not look at any 
substitute. 

How then, if so, can the offering of animals, or of 
anything else, be of the slightest use? Take an 
illustration. A wants to give a piece of land to B. 
He gets a deed of gift drawn up, signs it and hands 
ittoB. Asa piece of parchment it is worth virtually 
nothing; but as a deed of gift it has the whole value 
of the piece of land. Legally it so represents the 
property that in giving the one he gives the other. 
When an Israelite sinned, he took himself away from 
God; he deprived God of His rightful property, 
and he had to give himself back. An act of self- 
surrender was necessary, and in doing it he made 
use of a deed of gift. The animal burnt on the altar 
was not a substitute for himself. God would no 
more be satisfied with that than B would be satisfied 
if A gave him the parchment as a substitute for the 
land. The animal represented the penitent, so 
that in the act of handing over the animal to God 
he handed over himself. That is the true theory 


124 CONCERNING CHRIST 


of animal sacrifice. And if the worshipper in 
giving the animal had really and truly given himself, 
the deed of gift would have meant what it ought to 
mean. But in fact, though the daily repetition of 
the legal fiction went on, and the deed of gift was 
duly offered, God never got the real thing. He 
never got the perfect surrender of the human heart 
and will. The only adequate deed of gift would be 
a human heart and will surrendered completely and 
voluntarily to Him. 

And that brings us to the Self-surrender of 
Christ. When we try to see what that meant, it is 
clear that it must have involved more than His 
death; it involved His life as well as His death. 
His life of perfect human obedience was as necessary 
as the death for the completion of the Self-surrender. 
On the other hand the obedience of the life would 
not have been complete without the death as its 
climax and culmination. ‘Sacrifices and offerings 
Thou wouldst not . . . Then said I, Lo, I am come 
to do Thy will, O God’—to surrender My heart and 
will completely and voluntarily to Thee. But 
when God received that, He no longer received a 
deed of gift by a legal fiction; He received what really 
and actually represents mankind. He could say, 
Because a Man has offered Himself by life and 
death, a real beginning has been made of the self- 
surrender of all mankind. Every man who sins 
must still offer himself afresh by repentance and 
self-surrender; but no man is able to do it for 
himself in completeness; and yet representatively 
every man has done it already in the perfect Man. 
And therefore God in Christ hath forgiven us; 


SACRIFICE I25 


that is, Because we are in Christ we corporately 
share in the value of His Self-offering. 

But we still have the problem raised at the 
beginning of the chapter. What about the people 
who sinned and repented before Christ died? 
The answer arises out of the great fact that God is 
Love. Love by its very nature demands a response. 
It is not complete if it is not mutual. Since then, 
God’s love is complete, there must be eternally a 
mutual Love within His Being. We canrfiot under- 
stand it, but we try dimly to express it in metaphor 
when we speak of the mutual Love of God the 
Father and God the Son. The at-one-ment between 
the Father and the Son is eternal; the Son always 
surrenders Himself in Love to the Love of the 
Father. And that surrender in Love was mani- 
fested, exhibited outwardly in time and space in the 
Self-offering of Jesus Christ, thus becoming available 
as a deed of gift for all human beings. As the book 
of the Revelation puts it, in figurative language, 
He was ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world.’ The life and death of Christ represented 
an eternal fact; His sacrifice was the culminating 
human exhibition of Love, which is of the very 
essence of God, the Love of the Son to the Father, 
and the Love of God to man. And therefore since 
the first moment that man lived on the earth, and 
first learnt to sin, and first learnt to repent, there 
never was a time at which S. Paul’s words would 
not have had their full force, ‘God in Christ hath 
forgiven you,’ 


126 CONCERNING CHRIST 


8. METAPHORS OF SALVATION. 


The great subject upon which we have entered 
draws us to further study. The word ‘atonement’ 
no less than the word ‘sacrifice’ must be understood 
in relation to Old Testament thought. The meaning 
of the English word in and by itself is clear enough. 
In Acts vii. 26 we read that Moses came upon two 
men quarrelling, ‘and would have set them at one 
again.” The word atone means to set at one, to 
unite in harmony two persons between whom there 
has been discord. But it often happens—we saw 
an instance in the chapter on ‘repentance’—that 
an English word used to translate a word in a 
foreign language does not accurately represent its 
meaning. The word ‘atone’ is used sometimes in 
our Old Testament to translate a Hebrew word 
which means to ‘cover.’ When an Israelite sinned, 
and performed the necessary actions for putting the 
matter right with God, he was said to ‘cover’ his 
sin. On the other hand, when the action is God’s, 
though the same Hebrew word is used the English 
rendering is not ‘atone,’ but ‘purge away,’ or when 
the object is a person, it is ‘pardon’ or ‘forgive.’ 
To the Hebrew mind God was a great transcendent 
Being enthroned in heaven, as in Oriental majesty, 
immeasurably separated from man. A transgression 
might be ‘covered,’ so that the great Ruler would 
not look upon it and punish it. It could be hidden 
from God’s face (see Jerem. xvi. 17), or His face 
could be hidden from it (see Psalm li. 9); but that is 
very different from the bringing of two hearts and 
wills into harmony. The Greek translation of the 


METAPHORS OF SALVATION 127 


word, though it does not preserve the primitive 
metaphor of covering, hiding, veiling over, reflects 
the Israelite idea of God more nearly than the 
English. The Greek word means that when a 
sinner performs the requisite actions he ‘causes 
God to be merciful.’ God sees the sin, but merci- 
fully consents not to punish, because something has 
been done which alters His feelings towards the 
sinner. The English translation of the Greek word, 
which is found occasionally in the New Testament, 
is ‘propitiate.’ Christ is ‘a merciful and faithful 
High Priest to make propitiation for the sins of the 
people’ (Heb. ii. 17); ‘He is a propitiation for our 
sins’ (I John ii. 2); God ‘sent His Son to be a pro- 
pitiation for our sins’ (iv. 10); and S. Paul once 
speaks of ‘Christ Jesus whom God hath set forth as 
propitiatory’ (Rom. iii. 25). And the publican 
in the temple said ‘God, be Thou propitiated— 
made merciful—to me a sinner’ (S, Luke xviii. 13). 
These are all the passages in which the Greek word 
has been carried over from the Old Testament into 
the New. Not much stress, therefore, is laid upon 
the thought. That God, by whatever means, 
should be made merciful to a sinner is far from ex- 
pressing the fullness and depth of the Christian 
doctrine of the Atonement. We shall not approach 
that, so long as our thoughts are confined to an 
effect produced upon God by the death of Christ. 
Another Old Testament metaphor, that of re- 
deeming or ransoming, expresses an effect produced 
upon man. ‘The Son of Man came... to give 
His life a ransom for many’ (S. Mark x. 45; see 
I Tim. ii. 6). In the Old Testament a ransom was 


128 CONCERNING CHRIST 


a payment of money considered as an equivalent 
in value for a life that is to be ransomed; for example, 
in Exod. xxi. 30, xxx. 12. In the former case it is 
the ransom of a man who deserved death, in the 
latter of one who was in danger of death from a 
plague. And if our Lord intended this idea to be 
worked out strictly in His own case, His words 
mean that His human life was a payment to the 
Father as an equivalent for all mankind. But a 
strict working out of the idea is met with great 
difficulties. Christ’s death does not save man from 
physical death, for we all die. It is spiritual death 
from which we need to be saved; and a strict 
‘equivalent’ that would ransom us from that could 
only be Christ’s spiritual death. Words become 
meaningless when we attempt to work a metaphor 
rigidly. And in fact we find it very frequently used 
in the Old Testament with no thought at all of the 
payment of an equivalent, mostly to describe the 
deliverance from Egypt: e.g. ‘The Lord brought 
you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out 
of the house of bondmen’ (Deut. vii. 8); but also 
of other kinds of deliverance: ‘The Angel that 
redeemed me from all evil bless the lads’ (Gen. 
xlvili. 16); ‘in famine He shall redeem thee from 
death’ (Job v. 20); ‘O Lord my strength and my 
Redeemer’ (Psalm xix. 14); ‘I know that my 
Redeemer liveth,’ i.e. my Deliverer, Champion, 
He who takes my part. Thus the word was used 
of the great and sudden stroke of power by which 
the Messiah at His Advent would save His people: 
‘Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a 
cloud with power and great glory. And when these 


METAPHORS OF SALVATION — 12g 


things begin to come to pass, then look up and lift 
up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh’ 
(S. Luke xxi. 28); ‘we trusted that it had been He 
which should have redeemed Israel’ (xxiv. 21). 
When we ask how Christ redeemed us, we can say 
that it involved an action which cost Him much; 
and that brings us in the direction of the thought 
of a payment. But it should be noticed that the 
words ‘redeem’ and ‘ransom,’ carried over as they 
are from the Old Testament, do not by themselves 
necessarily imply a price paid. Still less a person 
to whom it is paid. A good instance can be seen in 
Gal. iii, 13, ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of 
the Law.’ When a slave is bought back from 
servitude, a price is naturally paid to the master. 
But no price can be paid to ‘the curse of the Law.’ 
Again, ‘redeemed from your vain hereditary manner 
of life, not with corruptible things, but with precious 
blood, as of a lamb without blemish’ (1 Pet. i. 18); 
that is, because of Christ’s perfect sacrificial death, 
you were brought safe out of your old sinful con- 
dition. S. Peter speaks of Christ’s blood as a price 
paid, because it cost so much to redeem their souls. 
But a price cannot be paid to a manner of life. 
He makes no mention of a slavery to the devil; 
and it is impossible to imagine any sense in which 
the devil can be said to have received the blood of 
Christ as a payment in return for which sinners are 
released from his bonds. Nor can the price be 
regarded as required by an offended and angry God, 
to be the equivalent of the punishment of all sinners. 
S. Paul says to the Colossians (i. 13) that God 
‘translated us into the Kingdom of the Son of His 


K 


130 CONCERNING CHRIST 


love, in Whom we have redemption, the remission 
of sins.” Redemption and remission are identified, 
and both alike are the gracious work of God the 
Father upon those who are in Christ. It is not that 
Christ redeemed us from something which God’s 
wrath would otherwise have inflicted on us. God 
Himself redeems us, rescues, delivers, emancipates us 
in Christ out of the Egypt of our sins. The whole 
drama of salvation is an act of the pure love of God. 
Eph. i. 7 teaches the same truth in almost identical 
language. And just afterwards, the final and con- 
summated salvation of all God’s people is called 
‘the redemption of the purchased possession.’ God 
has already purchased us, procured us to be His 
own, and will finally redeem us, completely deliver 
us, from our sins; and of this the sealing with the 
Holy Spirit at Baptism is a pledge. The word 
‘redemption’ here stands entirely out of the region 
of Jewish legal notions of a payment. 

By far the commonest word for the effect pro- 
duced upon men is ‘save,’ ‘salvation’—no metaphor 
but simply a statement of fact. Christians rejoice 
in the plain truth that they are saved. But if they 
are asked, By whom? the great majority would in- 
stinctively reply, By Jesus Christ, with the half- 
conscious corollary at the back of their minds that 
salvation is not the work of God the Father. If 
pressed on the subject they would probably go on 
to say that God the Father wanted us to be saved, 
and that His Son consented to come and do it; as 
though the Son really shewed more love than the 
Father! The Father sat enthroned in heaven, 
supreme, transcendent, benignant, and was glad 


METAPHORS ORO SAEVATION: . 137 


to see Jesus Christ doing the work. We only have 
to put the old inadequate Jewish ideas of God into 
simple language to find how nearly they correspond 
still to the rather hazy, unthinking ideas of many 
Christians. One of the great points of value in the 
Epistles to Timothy and Titus is the stress that 
they lay on the truth that it is God who saves us. 
In 2 Tim. ii. 9 it is taught that God’s salvation, and 
calling, and His own purpose and grace given us in 
Christ Jesus, were eternal facts, ‘before the world 
began’; they were made recognizable to man in 
time and space by the appearing and work of our 
Saviour Jesus Christ. Similarly in Titus i. 4, 
‘the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared,’ 
and then ‘according to His mercy He (God) saved 
us,’ sacramentally in Baptismal washing, spiritually 
by the renewing of the Holy Spirit, shed upon us 
through Jesus Christ. And in five other passages 
of these Epistles the writer speaks of “God our 
Saviour’; see also Jude v. 25. We shall never 
reach an idea of the Christian salvation which a 
thinking mind can accept until we realize as an 
actual working fact that God and Jesus Christ are 
one in love and in the act of saving. It was not one 
of three Individuals in heaven who consented to 
become Man; it was God who became Man. And 
anything that you can say about the love of Christ, 
you are saying about something that is divine, 
because it is the love of God. This is very likely a 
truism to the reader; but I have laid stress upon it 
because it is one of the things that need to be taught 
and taught again. To very many it is not a truism, 
but something that they do not know and have 


132 CONCERNING CHRIST 


never been taught with any clearness, that the love 
of the Son in man’s salvation zs the love of the 
Father. 

The words that we have examined so far describe 
actions which either produce an effect upon God 
or produce an effect upon man. We have met with 
nothing which suggests the producing of a mutual 
effect, the uniting into harmony and oneness of 
heart and mind and will. The nearest Greek word 
is that which is mostly translated ‘reconcile.’ 
But it is very instructive to compare the Jewish 
and Christian use of it. In the Greek Old Testa- 
ment the word occurs only in 2 Maccabees, where 
the writer is far from the Christian idea; God is 
still the great offended Potentate. “May God 
hearken to your supplication . . . and be reconciled 
to you’ (i. 5). The temple ‘which was forsaken 
in the wrath of the Almighty was, at the reconcilia- 
tion of the great Sovereign, restored again with all 
glory’ (v. 20). And He is spoken of as ‘reconciled 
to His servants’ (vii. 33, vili. 29). In Christian 
teaching it is we who keep ourselves hostile to God, 
He is always waiting and yearning in love for sinners 
to come back into unity with Him. ‘Be ye recon- 
ciled to God ’ (2 Cor. v. 20). ‘We were reconciled 
to God through the death of His Son’ (Rom. v. ro). 
These and all other similar passages must be in- 
terpreted in the light of the great sentence in 
2 Cor. v. 18, 19: ‘All things are from God, who 
reconciled us unto Himself through Christ, and has 
given to us the ministry of reconciliation, how that 
God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Him- 
self,’ 


FIRST PRINCIPLES 133 


g. First PRINCIPLES. 


Underlying the whole subject are two funda- 
mental conceptions on which our thoughts must 
be based. The first is one which we know theoreti- 
cally, but which is extremely hard to grasp with 
any vividness, i.e. the solidarity of life. In man is 
seen the highest exhibition of the one universal life. 
But just because he is the highest, in his possession 
of self-consciousness and freedom of will, he has the 
capacity of sinning, and because he sins he needs 
salvation. Man uses his will to push God away, 
so to speak, and needs to be brought back to Him 
again; that is, he needs at-one-ment. It cannot 
be too often or too clearly stated that Atonement 
is ultimately the at-one-ment of the combined 
will of humanity with God’s will. It is quite true 
that we must be saved from our sins individually or 
we shall not be saved at all. But the living whole 
of mankind is more than the arithmetical sum of its 
individuals, as a chord of music is more than the 
sum of its notes. It is because mankind is one 
solid whole that salvation is possible. Corporate 
atonement must come before individual atonement. 
Without a real grasp of the oneness of humanity 
we can never understand the great doctrine that we 
are studying. 

And the second fundamental conception that we 
must get clear may be expressed in the word 
potentiality. Consider the one living whole of 
humanity. It is intended to be in complete union 
with God. What God wants it to enjoy—what 
He wants to enjoy Himself—is the union of the 


134 CONCERNING CHRIST 


will of combined humanity with His will. That is, 
not a sinking, or suppression, or mere submission, or 
annihilating of the human will. God does not 
want to absorb us, we do not aim at being absorbed, 
so that God is left but not humanity. God will 
exist as other than humanity, He will retain His 
transcendence, for ever and ever, because man for 
ever and ever will retain his freedom of will. 
Humanity will always be humanity. But, let me 
repeat, He wants the will of combined humanity 
to become identical with His will. And instead of 
co-operating with Him and making our will iden- 
tical with His, mankind as individuals and as one 
whole have pushed Him away. What can bring 
us back to Him? He will not, He cannot by His 
very Nature, pull us back by force. That would at 
once annihilate the human will, and all identity and 
mutuality would be destroyed. Mankind as one 
whole must come back to Him voluntarily. And 
the tremendous truth of the Atonement is that 
mankind has begun to come back, because one Man 
has made the move. One Man has made His human 
will identical with God’s will. So that God can 
look at the one solid whole of humanity and say, 
Now it is on its way back to Me. Because of Jesus 
Christ it has actually begun to be in union with 
Me. That is a potentiality which needs gradually 
to become actual. But because of that potentiality 
because the process of at-one-ment has actually 
begun, God can treat every other individual in the 
whole mass as though the whole mass had come 
back to Him, zf the individual is trying to make the 
thing real for himself. Any human will that longs 


FIRST PRINCIPLES 135 


and strives to get back into identity with God’s 
will is forgiven and accepted and embraced because 
one Man has made a start. 

So that the three well known meanings of ‘salva- 
tion’ fall naturally into their places. It is future, 
present, and past. My final salvation can be 
nothing short of the perfect identity of my will with 
God’s will. And in striving towards that finality, 
my will, my own individual self must play its 
essential part. If I were carried one inch on the 
road to God without, or against, my will, it would 
mean that my will was taken from me, and there 
would be no salvation for me at all. We must keep 
fast to the truth that it is my will that must reach 
the perfect condition of wanting all that God wants, 
and never wanting anything else, and that my will 
is my own to all eternity. 

But at present we are a long way from that 
finality. And yet now, at this moment, the process, 
the progress into union with God, can be going on. 
If I am doing my best to make it go on, God forgives 
my sins, and helps me by His Holy Spirit, because 
I am a member of the one solid body of mankind 
that is potentially on its way to God in virtue of the 
fact that one Man has actually done what all man- 
kind ought todo. Ican be ‘in the way of salvation,’ 
‘being saved,’ not merely because of my own 
efforts, though they are essential, but because my 
efforts, as part of the efforts of the whole mass, 
are counted by God as potentially crowned with 
success in virtue of the actual complete success of 
one Man. 

And, thirdly, it is clear that we are right in saying 


136 CONCERNING CHRIST 


that salvation was wrought and completed for us 
in the past. The ‘whole body of humanity would 
not be potentially on its way to God if one Man had 
not in the past performed the great act of uniting it. 

If this, then, is the two-fold basis of our thoughts— 
solidarity and potentiality—-we can see why some 
people find the doctrine of the Atonement so difficult. 
Some, at any rate, of their difficulty lies in the fact 
that individualism plays so large a part in their 
view of life that the solidarity of mankind is not 
solid at all to their minds, but the haziest of abstrac- 
tions; and without it, the further thought of poten- 
tiality is meaningless. 

Before we go on to see how these principles work, 
let us glance at some of the reasons why the doctrine, 
as it has often been formulated, is quite unconvincing 
to the thinking man of to-day. In every age, 
whether they like it or not, and whether they know 
it or not, men live in a certain intellectual atmos- 
phere. The circumstances of the day, the general 
ideas of life, form—to use another metaphor— 
a sort of stream along which everyone is carried 
who thinks at all. And any great truths, such as the 
twofold doctrine of the Incarnation and the Atone- 
ment, must be presented to him in a form that will 
appeal to him in this stream or atmosphere of 
thought. If you express the doctrine in a form, 
for instance, which commended itself to thinkers 
in the middle ages, the twentieth century thinker 
cannot feel satisfied. It has been pointed out by 
Canon Storr in his book The Problem of the Cross, 
that there have been at least four different con- 
ceptions of the Atonement which resulted from 


FIRST PRINCIPLES 137 


the general trend of thought in different periods of 
the Church’s history. Ina state of society in which 
slavery was the universal background of social life, 
and when the rights of individuals as human beings 
did not exist, men, women, and children were 
carried off by armies or by brigand raiders and sold 
into slavery. To free them generally meant the 
payment of a sum of money. This state of things, 
with the language of the Old Testament to reinforce 
it, led to the idea of ransom or redemption, which 
has been before us in the last chapter. Some of the 
early Fathers made the mistake, which has so often 
been made, of confusing metaphor and fact. Man 
was a slave to sin, or a slave to the devil; and the 
Atonement was accomplished by the payment of a 
ransom. And they were sometimes led to what 
Dr. Rashdall rightly calls the monstrous explana- 
tion that the ransom was paid to the devil; this, 
again, led to the even more monstrous theory that 
since the devil could not keep possession of Christ, 
because Christ by His resurrection escaped from his 
bondage, the devil was outwitted by God. No one, 
of course, holds this grotesque theory now. But 
since the modern man does not think in terms of the 
third or fourth century, and does not know his Old 
Testament, much less the right explanation of Old 
Testament vocabulary, the very metaphor of ransom 
or redemption is felt to be foreign and unnatural. 
The metaphor held sway for five centuries or so; 
and then for another five or six centuries all thought 
was dominated by the legal conceptions of the 
Roman jurists. Sin was a violation of God’s law; 
and the violation of law called, of course, for the 


138 CONCERNING CHRIST 


infliction of penalties, a thought which was reinforced, 
as before, by Old Testament language expressing 
the juridical spirit of social life in Israel. Some- 
thing had to be done by which man could escape 
these penalties without the infringement of God's 
prerogatives as Law-giver and Judge. Thus the 
Atonement became a forensic transaction. The 
punishment of Christ was held to be a legal equiva- 
lent for the punishment of all other men. The 
obvious truth was not taken into account that man 
is, in fact, punished for his sins, whenever his sins 
result in trouble, disease, or pain. If Christ suffered 
physical death, we ali suffer it without exception. 
On the other hand, as has already been said, if 
man’s punishment is spiritual death, the idea that 
Christ underwent it instead of us is meaningless. 
There is not a shadow of a hint in the whole New 
Testament that God punished His Son. Vicarious 
suffering is quite a different matter, as we shall see. 
But in the period of which we are thinking the 
crudest theories of substitution and vicarious punish- 
ment were offered, from which every thinking man 
to-day revolts. In the twelfth century the imagina- 
tion of Europe began to be held by the crusades. 
The highest virtue was knightly chivalry, and the 
idea of ‘honour’ was in the air. God’s honour was 
violated by man’s sin; and He had to save man 
and yet vindicate His own honour. The word 
‘satisfaction’ loomed large in theological language, 
in a sense analogous to that in which it was used at 
a time when duelling was indispensable among 
gentlemen. Once more, we get down to the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when men 


ATONEMENT 139 


fervently believed in the divine right of kings. 
God was the divine King, whose royal majesty 
must be upheld—a _ characteristically Hebrew 
conception. He could graciously bestow a royal 
pardon. Shakespeare was true to the spirit of his 
age when he said ‘Mercy seasons justice,’ mercy 
which ‘is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an 
attribute to God Himself.’ In kingly magnanimity 
God accepted the sacrifice of One, and let the rest off. 

Can we wonder that men and women to-day 
reject the doctrine of the Atonement when they 
identify it with one or other of the inadequate 
ideas of the past? Those who are not religiously 
minded are willing to reject the rest of the Christian 
religion with it. Many who at heart are deeply 
religious cry insistently, Let us get back to the 
simple moral teaching of Jesus whom we honour and 
love, and we need no more. And if we wish to try 
to satisfy thinkers of that kind, we must not cling 
to the theological language and metaphors of the 
fourth century, or the ninth, or the twelfth, or the 
sixteenth. We must speak in terms of the twentieth, 
and shew that the Atonement as we understand it, 
is in harmony with, and meets the needs of, the 
modern mind. 


Io, ATONEMENT. 


What, then, is the stream or atmosphere in which 
the modern thinker moves, and which exercises an 
effect upon his theology? I think we may say that 
it is one which has resulted from three main forces: 
(xr) accurate historical criticism; (2) socialism; 
(3) a profound study of the natural sciences. And 


140 CONCERNING CHRIST 


the doctrine of God, and therefore of the Incarnation 
and the Atonement, must be stated in such a way 
as not to be foreign to any of these. 

First, then, accurate historical criticism, while 
it has left quite untouched the belief of the Christian 
Church that Jesus Christ was the unsullied ex- 
hibition of the character of God, has made us realize 
how truly and completely human He was. It has 
given us what we call the historic sense, by which 
we can understand the story of any life, including 
the story of His life, in its historical setting. It 
cannot be rightly studied without an appreciation 
of its racial, social and religious environment. 
It is an insult to the modern man to offer him any 
theory of the Incarnation and the Atonement 
which does not take into account the full and true 
humanity of our Lord. 

Secondly, I have used the word ‘socialism.’ 
It is not intended in any political or class sense, 
but only in the sense of the gradual approach that 
civilized nations are making, or trying to make, 
towards a grasp of the truth that we are members 
one of another; that no man liveth or dieth to 
himself, but is in essential relation to the whole 
body of mankind. It is the truth that lies behind 
what is commonly called socialism; it lies behind 
trades unions, and the betterment of the labouring 
classes, and democracy, and patriotism. To the 
modern man it stands in the very foreground of 
life’s picture. Translated into religious language 
it is Love. Christian ethics provided for its satis- 
faction nineteen centuries ago. If when we survey 
all human virtues we must say, The greatest of these 


ATONEMENT I4I 


is Love, the modern man demands that if there is a 
God at all, He must be a God of Love. 

And thirdly the study of the natural sciences in 
all its branches, especially perhaps biology and 
physics, and strongly supported by psychology, is 
leading men away from the crude materialism of 
men like Haeckel, who exercised so deep an influence 
in the Victorian era. Researches on the nature of 
the atom, on life, and on the fsyche, have produced 
notions of a more spiritual kind. They confirm 
more surely than ever the conviction that the 
universe is a universe of order; but it is less and 
less conceived of as a purely mechanical order. 
It is increasingly understood by the best thinkers 
of the day that the ultimate reality lying behind or 
within the material order is Spirit. Now when this 
tendency is viewed in relation to Theology, the 
student of science who is not altogether averse to 
the idea of God is mostly ready to accept a view 
which identifies God with this ultimate, spiritual 
reality at the heart of all things. No form of 
Christianity, therefore, will appeal to bim that does 
not take into full account the Immanence of the one 
universal life of God. 

The Humanity of Christ, the Love of God, and 
the Immanence of God. Three points are necessary 
to give stable equilibrium; and these are the three 
points on which the religion of the modern man 
must rest. (It is true that he does not always 
see that God’s Love and God’s Immanence, both 
of which his bent of mind imperatively demands, 
involve the very paradox which Christianity always 
offers—an immanent God who is also transcendent. 


142 CONCERNING CHRIST. 


A God of Love must be one who loves persons, 
otherwise Love has no meaning; He must be 
Himself personal if He loves, while He is also the 
indwelling Principle of the life of the universe.) 
The question is whether the doctrine of the Atone- 
ment can be so stated that its centre of gravity 
will not fall outside these three points. Can it be 
made to fit in with these three fundamental re- 
quirements? It is hoped that these few chapters 
on the subject will help to map out a line of thought 
by which it will be seen, not only that it can be 
made to fit in with them but, that these three truths, 
the Humanity of Christ, the Love of God, and the 
Immanence of God, are the three crucial elements 
which go to make a true and satisfying statement 
of it. 

On the first of these not much need be added to 
what has been said in the first part of this volume. 
I would ask the reader to study chapter 6 again, as 
an essential portion of the study of the doctrine 
of the Atonement. If you say any single thing 
about the Man Jesus which makes Him not truly 
human, you take away one of the main supports of 
the doctrine, and it falls to the ground. All man- 
kind has begun to be at-one with God because one 
Man was in perfect unity with Him. But this 
would clearly be untrue if He was not really a Man. 
Again, in the next chapter we saw something of the 
nature of temptation. Our Lord, like any other 
man, felt the natural pressure of human instincts, 
the natural leanings to gratify desires which arose 
within Him. And His will was tested, tempted, 
as to whether He would try to gratify desires which 


ATONEMENT 143 


He knew were wrong, or whether He would refuse 
to try. Men, with their possession of will, reach 
their highest glory when they refuse to try, refuse 
to oppose Him and so use their will that they obey 
Him voluntarily. To do that is to subdue Self, to 
annul the separateness between Self and God which 
they have the power of preserving if they wish. 
For the most part men deliberately preserve this 
separateness by sin. Christ’s life was a continuous, 
consistent refusal. His will was a free human will, 
free to oppose God if He chose; and His natural 
human desire constantly tested, tempted His will. 
But He was always voluntarily obedient ;-always at- 
one with God. 3 

It is of the utmost importance to insist on the 
part played in our salvation by His perfect human 
life, which was always a reasonable, holy, and living 
sacrifice. It is only by giving that its true place 
that we can rightly understand the sacrifice of His 
death. Some have thought of it only as a grand 
martyrdom for God’s cause, which can inspire in us 
such feelings of grateful love and desire for goodness 
that we are enabled to overcome our sins. We 
want to see how it is that though our wills are free, 
and must play their essential part in working out 
our own salvation, yet they cannot by themselves 
bring us to be at-one with God. Once more we 
must refer to chapter 6 in Part I., where we thought 
of the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘Though 
He was a Son, yet learnt He obedience through the 
things that He suffered.’ He learnt more and more 
what perfect obedience involved as His trials and 
sufferings increased in extent; His will was tested 


144 CONCERNING CHRIST. 


by harder and harder temptations as life went on. 
But if so, does not that make it clear that in order 
to learn obedience in its final and uttermost fullness, 
He had to experience suffering in its final and utter- 
most intensity? His obedience, His voluntary 
Self-sacrifice, was perfect all through His life; but 
it could not have reached its complete development 
without the Cross. He learnt all there was to 
know about obedience by suffering all there was to 
suffer. ‘He became obedient,’ as S. Paul says, 
‘unto death,’ that is, even to the extent of death, 
‘the death of the Cross.’ The sufferings of His life 
fall short of their complete value if they lose their 
climax which taught Him obedience to the utter- 
most. This is a very much greater thing than the 
martyrdom of a perfectly holy man for God’s cause. 
A martyrdom has a ‘subjective’ value; it inspires, 
and draws to imitation. But death as the climax 
of obedience has also an ‘objective’ value. Man- 
kind being one solid whole is separated from complete 
union with God by the wrong use of the will; and 
God could not look upon men as potentially at-one 
with Him unless a single, perfect representative 
of the whole body had kept Himself at-one with 
Him by an obedience, a Self-sacrifice, which reached 
its supreme consummation of development through 
the supreme consummation of suffering. 

But the modern man needs more than that. He 
says, If that is all it seems to assume a God who 
merely demands self-sacrifice, just and exacting, 
but unsympathetic and remote from humanity. 
And that is the sort of God whom he rightly rejects. 
If there is a God at all, He must be the sum of all 


ATONEMENT 145 


moral perfections; above all He must be a God of 
Love. What part is played in the Christian scheme 
of Atonement by the Love of God? We want to 
shew people that it plays a part which may be 
compared with the part which is usually under- 
stood to be played by ether in the material 
universe. It so permeates everything, and is the 
ground and vehicle of everything, that it may 
practically be said that ether is the universe, and 
the universe is ether. Atonement is the Love of 
God, and the Love of God is the Atonement. Love, 
as we have said, by its very nature demands a 
response. It is not complete if itis not mutual. In 
chapter 7 we thought of this in connexion with the 
mutual Love of the Father and the Son. But it is 
equally true of the Love between God and man. 
His love was such that He made man capable of 
loving Him. That is what we mean when we say 
that man was made in the Image of God. But if 
man is capable of loving, he must be capable of 
loving voluntarily. A forced love is not love at all. 
But if it is voluntary, he must be capable of refusing 
to love if he wishes. Thus because God is love, 
He must leave man free to sin if he chooses. That 
is one of the baffling mysteries of the universe. 
The very quality of the Godhead with which man 
is endowed gives the finite the power of opposing the 
Infinite; if we may use the expression, it tears the 
Godhead in two. 

But because God is Love, and therefore shares His 
divine Nature with man, He sympathizes with man. 
I hesitate to use human illustrations because the 
best of them are never adequate in thinking of the 


L 


146 CONCERNING CHRIST 


Nature of God. But since, after all, man’s nature is 
akin to His, an earthly story may be useful in 
suggesting a heavenly meaning. I once heard of a 
mother who took her daughter to see a doctor, and 
learned that the girl had sinned, and was going to 
give birth toa child. Nota word of reproach passed 
the mother’s lips; and the girl went home with her 
silent, hard and defiant. But next morning she 
saw that her mother’s hair had turned white in the 
night. And that broke her down. It was love 
that broke her down. Not a love that made light 
of faults, and shut its eyes to sin, but a love so 
intense that she felt her daughter’s sin as her own 
sin and her shame as her own shame. The Lord 
had laid on her the iniquity of her child. If we 
carry that up to the highest, we see something of the 
divine Love, the sympathy of God revealed in Jesus 
Christ. God can never shut His eyes to sin, and 
condone it, and turn His back upon it, and treat 
it as if it did not exist. Sin is awful because God 
feels it. In identifying Himself with human nature 
His love made Him suffer from human sin and 
shame, as though it had been His own sin and 
shame. The Lord hath laid on Him, that is on 
Himself revealed in the flesh, the iniquity of us all. 
He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our 
behalf. The story will at least illustrate the wide 
difference between vicarious suffering and vicarious 
punishment. The mother who loved her erring 
daughter suffered vicariously, but she was not 
punished to let the daughter off. 

And consider a further point. While the mother 
felt the sin and shame before the daughter did, 


PN ey 


ATONEMENT | 47 


it would have been wasted suffering, as far as the 
girl was concerned, if it had not melted her heart 
and broken her down. Christ the divine Penitent, 
as He has been called, not only underwent the stress 
and strain and suffering day by day involved in 
keeping His will at-one with the Father’s will, 
but He died to sin; death, as the climax of His 
obedience, was needed that He might be freed from 
the sin and shame with which by His sympathy He 
identified Himself. But all this does not let us 
off the necessity of shame and suffering and penitence. 
Ask the saint whether the death of Christ lets him 
off the shame of his sins, and he will tell you that it 
is the very Love revealed in the death that makes 
him feel the shame. All that Christ did brings 
man Atonement potentially, not actually. We get 
God’s forgiveness, we get all the glory and dignity 
and peace of His friendship and love, we are taken 
back time after time into communion with Him, 
whenever we repent, because He can treat us as 
having potentially arrived at the ideal towards 
which we are striving, in virtue of one Man who 
did arrive. But our striving, our growth, our 
progress are essential factors in the scheme. Faith, 
as S. Paul understood it, is our throwing ourselves 
into the scheme, making personal use of what Christ 
has done, and is doing. Works are the actual 
outcome of the state of progress that we have reached 
at any given moment. Both faith and works are 
included in our attainment of salvation, and 
cannot be left out of it without destroying it. 
But, finally, someone may say, Is not all this 
rather Pelagian? If the result of Christ’s work is 


148 CONCERNING CHRIST 


only a potentiality, and the actuality must be 
brought about by our works, does not the chief 
burden after all fall upon us? But we have not 
yet considered the whole of Christ’s work. We 
saw that three points were needed for equilibrium; 
three demands are made by the modern man. 
Christ’s Humanity and God’s Love must be com- 
pleted by the divine Immanence—the Spirit of God, 
which is the indwelling Principle of all life; of 
natural life, or the life of Nature, in which there 
is no free will to cause stress and strain, and of 
spiritual life in which the stress and strain are 
always present. Few things shew more clearly 
how inadequate the popular ideas of the Atonement 
are than the almost complete omission of the work 
of the Holy Spirit. The exhibition of God’s love 
in the death of Christ can melt our hearts and break 
down our hardness when we have sinned. But to 
progress, to make the potentiality more and more 
actual, does not lie entirely with ourselves. It is 
impossible, indeed, without our own exercise of free 
will; but it is also impossible without the abiding 
presence of the divine Spirit. The Spirit of God is 
the Spirit of the killed and risen Christ. ‘The 
love of God is spread abroad in our hearts through 
the Spirit which He has given us.’ It is quite wrong 
to speak of the atoning work of Christ as if it were 
only in the past. Our daily spiritual life in the 
present is part of the Atonement. From one point 
of view it is our voluntary acceptance and ap- 
propriation and actualizing of that for which 
Christ died; from another it is the continuation of 
His work of making us progressively at-one with God, 


EXPERIENCE £46 


We learn, then, that the Atonement rests upon the 
Humanity of Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the 
indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In other words it is 
the whole work, past, present, and future of the 
sacred and undivided Trinity. 


Ir. EXPERIENCE. 


“Behold we go up to Jerusalem, and all the things 
that are written by the prophets shall be accom- 
plished unto the Son of Man. For He shall be 
delivered up unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, 
and shamefully entreated, and spit upen; and they 
shall scourge and kill Him; and the third day He shall 
rise again.’ S. Luke thus records our Lord’s pre- 
diction to the disciples, and adds ‘and the saying 
was hid from them.’ It seems to us as clear as words 
could makeit. But to the disciples the meaning was 
all blurred and confused, like small print to a weak- 
sighted person without his spectacles. And these 
disciples are like a great many people to-day, 
especially perhaps young people. Iam not thinking 
of the militant unbeliever, the man with a smattering 
of knowledge of the contents of the Bible, who uses 
it as material for scoffing, and making jokes in bad 
taste. The disciples were followers of the Lord; 
they had been with Him for months in the closest 
intimacy; they had, as He said Himself, continued 
with Him in His temptations; they had passed 
through hardships and suffering with Him; they 
had journeyed with Him when He was practically 
driven out of the country by the hostility of the 
Scribes and Pharisees; with the exception of Judas 
Ischariot they all loved Him. And yet His saying 


150 CONCERNING CHRIST 


was hid fromthem. Many men and women to-day, 
and especially, as I say, young men and women, are 
like them. They bow in reverence before the 
Christian ideals of conduct; they try to go about 
doing good; they want to make the world better 
and happier; and they are quite clear in their minds 
that the surest way to make it better and happier is 
to persuade it to follow the moral teaching of 
Jesus Christ. They are, in very truth, His disciples. 
And yet some of the great facts about Him, some 
of the articles of the Christian creed, are blurred and 
indistinct and unintelligible to them. And some 
fathers and mothers are apt to take a mistaken 
attitude towards this sort of doubt. They are 
merely grieved, and think it is very sad, or they 
condemn it as wicked with little or no sympathy. 
They fail to understand that their sons and daughters 
are thinking, as they themselves perhaps never 
troubled to think; and reading, and discussing, and 
trying hard to get a rational and reasonable 
explanation of everything. In many cases the sons 
and daughters know that their doubts are very 
unlikely to receive sympathetic treatment at home, 
and so they hide them from their parents, and reveal 
them only to those who they think will sympathize, 
that is those who have similar doubts for similar 
reasons. There is a wide-spread notion that while 
the Christian ideals of conduct are the highest in the 
world, most of the Christian doctrines have been 
disproved by modern Biblical criticism, or modern 
science, or modern psychology, or modern something, 
The full truth is hidden from many thinkers 
because they lack the one thing necessary to 


EXPERIENCE 151 


make the blurred letters clear to their short- 
sightedness. 
Why was it that the disciples could not under- 


stand? It was because what our Lord told them — 


of His death and Resurrection had not yet fallen 
within their experience. They had the beginnings 
of a hope that He was to be the Jewish Messiah. But 
that the Messiah could be mocked and scourged and 
crucified was altogether beyond them. The mean- 
ing and purpose of His death had never crossed their 
imaginations; and His rising again meant to them 
nothing at all. The wordsin S$. John xiv. 29 exactly 
represent the situation: ‘And now I have told you 
before it come to pass, that when it is come to pass 
ye might believe.’ When they had gained im- 
mediate, living, personal experience, when the events 
that He foretold had affected their own lives, when 
He had actually been crucified, and appeared to 
them alive after His Passion, then they would 
believe. Not because they had argued the thing 
out, and gained any rational explanation of why He 
should die, and how He could rise, but simply 
because they knew as facts in the history of thcir 
own life that He had died and had risen. After it 
had happened, after their experience had burned it 
in upon them with a certainty which made any 
doubt about it ludicrous, they were in possession of 
spiritual spectacles. They looked back at the 
words which He had spoken, and marvelled to 
think that there was a time when the saying was 
hid from them. 

And having got their spectacles, they could not 
only read the saying, but they could set to work to 


152 CONCERNING CHRIST . 


study it; not to find out if it was true—their personal 
experience had assured them of that—but to find 
out gradually its full volume of meaning, to set it in 
all its lights, to see it in all its bearings. S. Paul 
before his conversion no doubt examined the state- 
ments which the experience of Christians led them 
to make as to the Death and Resurrection of the 
Messiah, and no doubt decided that they were a pack 
of absurdities. The truth was hidden from him 
until it entered as a fact of history into his own life. 
The moment he got his spectacles, and there fell 
from his eyes as it had been scales, he could set to 
work to draw out what he felt was a reasonable 
account of it all. Whereas he was blind, now he 
saw. And the man or woman to-day who tries 
to reach a rational account of everything in Christ- 
ianity before gaining the light of this spiritual 
experience, will fail. He must fail; the thing is hid 
from him; and he is wasting his time and energy with 
argument and discussions and ponderings. All 
these can come afterwards; but the truth must 
affect his life before it can become clear to his 
reason. 

For instance, here is a man to whom the death of 
Jesus is the execution of a heroic martyr, who 
suffered for His loyalty to the highest moral ideals; 
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, 
dead, and buried—which is almost the only article 
in the creed that some people to-day are willing to 
accept. How can he reach a satisfactory conception 
of the Atonement? How can he argue about the 
meaning—the effective, active meaning—of Christ’s 
death until he has had some effectual, actual 


EXPERIENCE 153 


experience of it? It is like arguing about the merits 
of a picture that he cannot see. 

I will tell you when he can begin to argue. It is 
when he has begun to know that sin is sin; when 
he has begun to feel that his own sins are a chain 
and a burden and a disease and a blot; when the 
memory of past sins has begun to. trouble him; 
when he has tried to be free of his present sins and 
cannot; when he has struggled, and struggled in 
vain; and at last his shame and helplessness have 
wrung from him the cry, ‘O Lamb of God, that 
takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon 
me.’ He has not reached that point by arguing in 
what sense Christ is the Lamb of God, and how He 
takes away the sins of the world. But when he 
knows, as a matter of personal history, that his 
own sin has in fact been taken away, he can then, 
in the light of that blazing fact, examine the theories 
of the Atonement, and try gradually to grasp it in all 
its magnitude and complexity. The truth is hidden 
from his intellect until it has done something for his 
soul. 

And the same is true of the Resurrection. He 
examines the accounts in the four Gospels, and 
finds them full of difficulties and discrepancies. He 
studies the human body with all the resources of 
modern research, and finds, of course, that the 
resuscitation of a corpse is impossible. He studies 
the human mind in the light of modern psychology, 
and decides that the early disciples, who said that 
they saw the risen Lord, must have been under the 
influence of a very natural auto-suggestion. And 
he goes his way honestly convinced that the doctrine 


54 CONCERNING CHRIST . 


of the Resurrection has no rational or practical value. 
He is examining something that he cannot see. 

But if he has cried to the Lamb of God to take 
away his sins, and has risen with a new hope, and 
found a strength that he never found before; if he is 
conscious of a Presence that never fails him however 
often he fails, and a Friend that loves him however 
often he turns his back upon Him; if Christ has 
become a living, working power in his life; then it has 
become too obvious to need argument that the 
Lamb of God who died must be alive. And if 
Christ is alive in him, he can also see Him alive in 
many other people, and can understand that He has 
always been alive in the whole Body of His people. 
‘Christ liveth in me’ is the primal fact which is high 
above all argument. But in the light of it, and rest- 
ing on the certainty which nothing can touch, he 
can begin with safety to examine it. He will be 
predisposed to say that there must be some explana- 
tion, whether he has found it or not. He will not be 
content merely to say that the resuscitation of a 
corpse is impossible. He may incline to S. Paul’s 
teaching in r Cor. xv., or he may incline to some 
other theory. The Resurrection may present many 
difficulties to his intellect. But having experienced 
the life of Christ in him, he is in a position to say, 
However difficult I find it to explain, whatever 
Biblical criticism, or science, or psychology, may 
have to say about it, one thing I know—that Christ 
is alive. To suggest the contrary is ludicrous. 

Those, then, who feel horribly uncertain about 
the central doctrines of Christianity can remember 
that from the disciples ‘the saying was hid’ at first. 


EXPERIENCE Iss 


Begin by real sorrow for sin, and a cry to the Lamb 
of God for cleansing; get His Atonement first; get 
His life and strength and power and love; be crucified 
with Him, and rise with Him to newness of life. 
And you will find that the doctrines, though they 
may continue for some time, perhaps always in this 
life, to be difficult to understand, will cease to be 
improbable. They will become compelling certain- 
ties in which you will live and die, and live again 
in the further life to understand as you can never 
understand them now. 





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